Whatever Happened to the Vladimir Tiara¿ The Romanov Jewels Smuggled Out of Revolutionary Russia.

in 1921 a diamond tiara changed hands in london for 28 000 pounds it was not in perfect condition the frame had been damaged on its journey two of its diamonds were missing the woman selling it was the daughter of a russian grand duchess her mother had died in exile the year before the empire her family once ruled no longer existed the woman buying it was the queen of great britain Four years earlier, this tiara had been locked in a hidden safe inside a palace on the Neva River. While revolution swept through the streets of Petrograd outside, it did not leave that palace in a royal procession. It left in one of two leather bags carried by a British art dealer with no official reason to be there. Three decades after the sale, the same 15 diamond circles would rest on the head of a young queen. For nearly 70 years, millions of Americans would see them on television, on magazine covers, and in official portraits, without ever knowing where they had been. But the story of the Vladimir Tiara is not the story of a sale. It is the story of a jewel that outlived the empire it was made to celebrate. Every week we follow the royal jewels that left their crowns and vaults and find out where they ended up. Give the video a like and subscribe if you want to keep following them. The story begins in northern Germany in 1854. Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was born that May in Ludwigslust, a small palace town in one of the quieter corners of the German states. Her father was the reigning Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Her family was old, Protestant, and respectable. It was not rich in the way that mattered in the great courts of Europe. A princess from Mecklenburg could expect a comfortable life, a suitable marriage, and very little attention from anyone outside Germany. Marie had other plans. In the early 1870s, she met Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia, the third son of Emperor Alexander II. He was seven years older than she was, tall, cultivated, and fond of art and fine food. He would later serve as president of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. He was also a Romanov, which meant he belonged to the richest ruling family on earth. There was one obstacle. Romanov brides were expected to convert to the Russian Orthodox faith. Marie refused. She intended to remain a Lutheran, the faith she was raised in. For a time, the marriage seemed impossible. Then the emperor relented. Marie was allowed to keep her religion, an unusual concession at the Russian court, and one that told everyone in St. Petersburg something about the woman who was coming. She would remain a Lutheran for more than 30 years. She converted only in 1908 on her own terms at a moment of her own choosing. The wedding took place in St. Petersburg in late August 1874. Marie was 20 years old. In Russia, she took a new name, Maria Pavlovna, and a new title, Grand Duchess. The court gave her another name as well. She became known simply as Grand Duchess Vladimir after her husband. Her family had always called her by a nickname from childhood. A Romanov wedding was not only a marriage, it was a display of wealth meant to be seen by every embassy in the capital. Brides arrived to find chests of jewels waiting for them, gifts from the emperor, from the groom, from relatives across the dynasty. Emperor Alexander II gave his new daughter-in-law emeralds that had come down through the imperial treasury, stones that would later rank among the finest in Russia. And at around the time of the wedding, according to most accounts, she received a new tiara. The jewelers who made it were the House of Bohlen. The firm had been working in St. Petersburg since the late 18th century, and by the middle of the 19th, it held the title of jeweler to the imperial court. Its leading family had come from Sweden. Bohlen made coronation pieces, wedding parures, and diplomatic gifts for the Romanovs for generations. Fabergé, the name most Americans associate with Russian imperial jewels, Was still a modest family business when Bolin was already making tiaras for grand duchesses. The tiara Bolin delivered was built on a simple idea, repeated 15 times. 15 circles of diamonds, each one interlaced with the next, forming a band that rose in the front and curved around the head. Inside each circle hung a single pear-shaped pearl. The diamonds were set in silver over gold. The pearls were left free to move. The records do not agree on every detail of its origin. Most historians date the tiara to the period of the 1874 wedding. At least one well-known study of the British royal jewels places the commission later, around 1890. What is certain is the maker, the design, and the owner. Everything else about the tiara's first years must be stated with care. The materials themselves came from far outside Russia. The pearls were described as oriental pearls, the term the jewelry trade used for natural saltwater pearls, most often fished from the beds of the Persian Gulf. A natural pearl is not grown or seeded by human hands. It forms by chance inside an oyster, and Devers brought them up one shell at a time. 15 pearls of similar size and shape match closely enough to hang in a row, represented years of sorting by dealers who handled thousands. The diamonds most likely came from one of two places. For more than a century, most of Europe's diamonds had come from Brazil, from mines in the region of Minas Gerais, where for generations much of the digging had been done by enslaved workers. By the 1870s, a new source was beginning to flood the market. The diamond fields around Kimberley, in southern Africa, discovered only a few years before Marie's wedding. Which mines supplied the stones in this tiara, no surviving record says. What the stones were meant to say is clearer. The branch of the family Marie had married into was not the ruling branch. Her husband was a younger son. He would never be emperor unless something happened to his brothers and their children. But the Vladimirs intended to live as though the crown might one day come their way. They built a palace to prove it. The Vladimir Palace stood on the palace embankment along the Neva River, a short walk from the Winter Palace itself. It was completed in the early 1870s, just before the wedding, and designed to rival anything in the capital. Its rooms were finished in a dozen historical styles. Renaissance, Gothic, Moorish, Russian. It had a dining room built to seat large banquets, reception rooms for hundreds of guests, and a library for the Grand Duke's books and collections. It would also have, in time, something no visitor ever saw. Somewhere in the private rooms, the Grand Duchess kept a safe. In the beginning, the tiara was simply one of many jewels in the collection of a young woman who intended to become the most important hostess in Russia. She had four surviving children over the next eight years, three sons, Kirill, Boris, and Andrei, and one daughter, Elena, born in 1882. Elena, the youngest, would one day inherit the 15 diamond circles. She would also be the one to sell them. But in those first years, nobody in the Vladimir Palace imagined that any of its jewels would ever be sold. They were not assets. They were statements. A tiara in St. Petersburg announced rank, marriage, and ambition in a language every person in a ballroom could read from across the room. Meekin spoke that language better than almost anyone at the Russian court. To understand what she was wearing and what would later be lost from it, one has to look closely at how those 15 circles were made. A tiara is not one object, it is hundreds of small decisions, each made by a different pair of hands held together by metal thinner than a pencil lead. The Vladimir tiara begins with its diamonds. Every stone in its 15 circles was cut in the style of its century. Today, most diamonds sold in an American jewelry store are modern round brilliants. Cut by machine to precise angles worked out by mathematicians in the 20th century. The diamonds in this tiara came before all that. They were what jewelers now call old mine cut diamonds. A cushion shaped stone, squarish with softly rounded corners, cut by hand with a tall top, a small flat surface on the crown, and a deep body beneath. The name comes from the old mines of of India and Brazil, the sources that supplied Europe before Southern Africa. An old mine cut does not throw light the way a modern diamond does. It does not produce a hard white sparkle under electric bulbs. It glows. In candlelight, the light a Russian ballroom was lit by in the 1870s, it breaks into slow flashes of color, red and blue and gold, that seem to move across the stone as the wearer turns her head. That was the light this tiara was designed for. Thousands of candles and crystal chandeliers reflected in mirrored walls and polished floors. Every surface in a St. Petersburg palace was meant to multiply light, and every jewel was meant to catch it. Cutting such as stones was slow and wasteful. A cutter would grind away much of a rough diamond's weight to bring out its fire, sometimes half of it or more. The dust went back into the work, mixed with oil to cut the next stone. Nothing about a diamond tiara was quick, and nothing about it was cheap, before a single piece of metal was shaped. Then came the setting. The diamonds were set in silver, backed with gold. This was the standard method of the age, and it solved a problem. Silver is white, and white metal flatters a white diamond, making it look larger and brighter. But silver is soft, and it tarnishes, leaving dark marks on skin, on hair, and on silk. Gold is stronger and does not darken. So jewelers built the setting in two layers, silver on the face, where the eye would see it, and gold on the back, where it touched the wearer. Platinum, the white metal that would later replace both, was not yet in wide use for fine jewelry. The design was a lesson in restraint. Many imperial tiaras of the period were crowded with motifs, wheat sheaves, bows, flowers, scrolls, double-headed eagles. The Vladimir tiara used one shape only, a circle. Each circle was a ring of diamonds overlapping the circles on either side so that the whole band read as a single interlocking chain. The largest circles stood at the center above the forehead. They diminished slightly toward the sides. A circle is the oldest symbol of continuity in European design. It has no beginning and no end. Whether the jeweler or the grand duchess intended that meaning, nobody recorded. But it is hard to look at the tiara now, after everything that happened to it, and not notice the shape. Inside each circle hung a pearl. This is the detail that made the tiara famous, and it is a small engineering problem in itself. The pearls were pear-shaped, wider at the bottom and narrowing toward the top. Each one was held by fine claws, small prongs of metal that gripped the narrow top of the pearl, attached to a loop suspended from the upper edge of its circle. The pearls were not fixed in place, they hung free. When the wearer stood still, they hung straight. When she turned, nodded, laughed, or danced, all 15 swung together, a fraction of a second behind her, like a row of small pendulums. Jewelers had a long tradition of making jewels move. One technique, called entremble, mounted stones on tiny coiled springs so that they trembled with every step, and many 19th century brooches were built that way. The Vladimir tiara used something simpler, gravity, 15 pearls, and room inside each circle for them to swing. The design had one more quality that would matter more than anyone could have guessed in 874. It was adaptable. The frame could be worn in more than one way, as a tiara rising above the forehead or as a closed circlet worn around the head. The pearls could be removed entirely, leaving the diamond circles empty, a look later collectors would call widowed. A tiara built to be taken apart and rearranged is a practical object for a woman who wants to wear it in different ways at different occasions. It is also an object that can be changed without much difficulty by whoever owns it next. That flexibility would save this tiara. It would also give its later owners the power to change what it was. What did it cost? No bill of sale for the original commission has been published. The House of Bolin's records from the imperial period were scattered after the revolution, and the Grand Duchess's private accounts have not been reconstructed in full. Any figure offered for the tiara's original price would be an invention, and this story does not need one. What can be said is how the market valued its materials. In the 1870s, natural pearls were among the most expensive substances on Earth. A matched set of large pearls could be worth more than the diamonds around them. That remained true for decades. The most famous illustration of it took place in New York. In 1917, the year the Russian Empire collapsed, a double strand of natural pearls was exchanged in Manhattan for a building. The pearls belong to Cartier. The building was a six-story mansion on Fifth Avenue owned by the businessman Morton Plant, whose wife wanted the necklace. The pearls were valued at about $1 million. Cartier took the house and made it its New York headquarters. It is still there. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, the Vladimir Tiara held 15 natural pearls, each one large enough to hang alone inside a ring of diamonds. The only price ever recorded for the tiara itself would come almost half a century after it was made in very different circumstances and from a very different seller. And then there were the hands. A jewel of this size in a St. Petersburg workshop of the 1870s passed through many people before it reached its owner. A designer drew it. A goldsmith shaped the gold back and the silver face, bending and soldering each circle by hand. A setter fixed the diamonds one at a time, pushing metal over the edge of each stone with a small steel tool under a magnifying lens. A polisher finished every surface, so that no rough edge caught the hair or the silk. Someone matched the pearls by size, shape, and color, rejecting far more than they kept. Someone else drilled or capped them and fixed the Their names are not recorded. Almost no workshop employee of the Imperial Jewelers is known by name today, apart from a few senior masters. But every diamond in those 15 circles was set by a person who spent a lifetime learning to do exactly that in a city where the work was steady because the court never stopped wanting more. The finished tiara was delivered to a woman who had refused to change her religion, married into the richest family on earth. And was already planning to become the center of its social life. 15 diamond circles, 15 swinging pearls, one maker, one owner, one design that could be taken apart and put back together again. No other tiara in Russia was built quite like it. That was precisely what would make it possible to change. For the next 40 years, the Vladimir Palace was the most talked about house in St. Petersburg. The emperor lived in the Winter Palace, a few 100 yards up the embankment. But the Winter Palace was a government as much as a home, heavy with ceremony and protocol. The Vladimir Palace was where people went to enjoy themselves. Diplomats, artists, officers of the guards, visiting royalty, writers, and wealthy foreigners all passed through its doors. An invitation from Grand Duchess Vladimir was one of the most valuable social currencies in the Russian capital. She built that position deliberately. Her husband commanded the Imperial Guard and later the military district of St. Petersburg. He presided over the Imperial Academy of Arts and collected books, paintings, and fine wines. She organized the household around him into what courtiers called, only half in jest, a second court. Her receptions were larger, livelier, and more international than those of the imperial family. Her dinners were known for their food. Her balls ran later. The tiara went with her through all of it. Surviving photographs show the Grand Duchess wearing the 15 circles in the style of her generation, set high on the head, the pearls hanging in a line just above her hair. In formal portraits of the period, she poses in court dress with a long train and a heavy brocade bodice. And the tiara is sometimes joined by necklaces, brooches, and a stomacher. A large jeweled ornament worn across the front of the dress. To a modern eye, the effect can look almost overwhelming. To a guest in a St. Petersburg ballroom in the 1880s, it was precisely what a grand duchess was supposed to look like. Those photographs matter for another reason. They are the best evidence anyone has of how the tiara looked before the revolution, before its journey, before its repairs. Historians who study it today compare them, circle by circle, with the tiara as it exists now. The years of the tiara's glory were also the years of the family's growth. Mikan had five children. Her first son, Alexander, died in infancy in 1877. Four survived. Kirill was born in 1876, Boris in 1877, Andrei in 1879. Elena, her only daughter, arrived in 1882. Elena grew up in the palace on the Neva, surrounded by the same jewels her mother wore. She was raised to make a royal marriage, and after one broken engagement, she made one. In 1902, she married Prince Nicholas of Greece in Denmark, the third son of King George the Virgin of Greece. The wedding took place at Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial estate outside the capital. Elena left Russia for Athens as Princess Nicholas of Greece. Over the next four years, she had three daughters, Olga, Elizabeth, and Marina. The youngest of those girls would one day play a small, unexpected part in this tiara story. In 1902, the same year as Elena's wedding, an American woman arrived in St. Petersburg. Her name was Consuelo Vanderbilt. She was the daughter of one of the richest families in the United States, raised between New York and Newport. And in 1895, at 18, she had been married to the 9th Duke of Marlborough. She was among the best known of the so-called dollar princesses, the American heiresses whose fortunes went into European titles and the houses that came with them. Consuela was not easily impressed by jewels. She owned a famous rope of pearls, once said to have belonged to Catherine the Great, and her family had spent millions on the houses of Fifth Avenue. But half a century later, when she wrote her memoirs, she still remembered an evening at the Vladimir Palace. After dinner she wrote, the Grand Duchess took her to her dressing room. There, set out in glass cases, were the jewels. Consuelo described an endless series of perures, complete match sets of jewelry in diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls, along with turquoises, tourmalines, aquamarines, and other colored stones. She also recorded what happened to them afterward, that it was on the proceeds of these jewels that the Grand Duchess lived once she fled the revolution. Consuelo did not describe each piece. She did not need to. The point of a dressing room arranged like a museum gallery was not the individual jewel. It was the sheer number. An American heiress who had seen the treasure rooms of Europe left that room with a memory strong enough to put in print 50 years later. The Grand Duchess was not only a collector of old jewels, she was a client of new ones. In the early years of the 20th century, a young Parisian jeweler named Louis Cartier was trying to break into the Russian market. Fabergé dominated St. Petersburg, and the imperial family bought from Russian firms. Cartier needed a patron at court. Grand Duchess Vladimir became that patron. She already ran a charity bazaar each Christmas in the capital, one of the great events of the St. Petersburg season. Through her, Cartier gained access to the Russian aristocracy. Representatives of the firm traveled to St. Petersburg, and a letter from 1908 survives in which a Cartier representative asked for an audience with members of the imperial family. The Grand Duchess bought from Cartier, wore Cartier, and became, by the account of the Cartier family's own historian, one of the firm's most important clients of the period. She also became a friend of Louis Cartier himself. In 1911, Louis Cartier asked her for something unusual. He wanted to borrow the Bolland Tiara. She agreed. For six months, the 15 diamond circles left the Vladimir Palace and went to Cartier so that Louis could study how they had been made. He examined the construction, the proportions, the way the pearls hung inside the circles. The lesson stayed with him. Two years later in 1913, Cartier made a new tiara. Diamond circles with pearls suspended inside them, a design that clearly descended from the one he had studied. It is known today as the Leeds Tiara. It was made for an American woman. Nancy Leeds was born Margaret Stewart in Zanesville, Ohio. Her second husband, William B. Leeds, had made a fortune in tin plate in Indiana and died in 1908, leaving her one of the wealthiest widows in the United States. She spent much of her time in Europe, and in 1920 she married into royalty. Her new husband was Prince Christopher of Greece and Denmark, the younger brother of Prince Nicholas. That made the woman from Zanesville the sister-in-law of Elena, Grand Duchess Vladimir's daughter. By 1920, both women would be part of the same exiled royal family. One of them owned a tiara inspired by the Vladimir circles. The other was about to inherit the original. By the time the Leeds tiara was finished, Grand Duchess Vladimir had been a widow for four years. Grand Duke Vladimir died in February 1909 at the age of 61. His wife took up some of his public roles, including the presidency of the Imperial Academy of Arts, and continued to run the palace as the center of her own social world. She was now in her 50s and more influential than ever. She had also made a decision that surprised many at court. In 1908, the year before her husband's death, after more than 30 years as a Lutheran, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Many in St. Petersburg read the conversion in political terms. Her son stood close to the line of succession. Grand Duke Kirill was third in line to the throne after the young heir, Alexei, and the emperor's brother, Grand Duke Michael. An Orthodox mother could only strengthen her family's position. Whatever her reasons, the woman who had once refused to change her faith for a marriage now changed it at a moment of her choosing. Her relationship with the reigning Empress was cool. Empress Alexandra, German born like Megan, but far more private, withdrew from society as her son's illness. Hemophilia, a blood disorder kept secret from the public, consumed her attention. The Empress avoided the balls and receptions that the Grand Duchess loved. Society noticed. Increasingly, the most brilliant entertaining in the capital happened not at the Winter Palace, but on the other side of the square, at the Vladimir Palace. That distance between the two households would matter later, in ways no one at the time could foresee. To the Romanov court, the tiara stood for something larger than one woman. It was part of the visual language of an empire that ruled a sixth of the world's land surface. The jewels on a grand duchess's head announced that the dynasty was rich enough, secure enough, and permanent enough to spend on beauty without limit. Foreign visitors were meant to leave impressed, most did. And the tiara had been on that head, in that role, for nearly four decades, through the reigns of three emperors, through the births of five children, a royal wedding, a conversion, and a funeral. Through the coming of electric light into palaces, when the old mine diamonds began to look a little softer than the new stones being cut in Antwerp and Amsterdam, then came the war. In August 1914, Russia went to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Saint Petersburg, whose German-sounding name no longer suited a nation at war with Germany, was renamed Petrograd. The Grand Duchess, born a German princess, turned her energy and her social network toward the war effort. She organized hospital trains and medical supplies for the front, and her name was attached to charitable work across the capital. The ball stopped, the jewels went into storage. Inside the Vladimir Palace, in the Grand Duchess's private rooms, the safe held most of the collection. The emeralds the emperor had given her on her wedding, the sapphires, the rubies, the pearls, and the Bolin tiara with its 15 diamond circles. Very few people knew exactly where the safe was or how to open it. The war went badly. By early 1917, Russia had suffered millions of casualties, food was scarce in the cities, and strikes spread through Petrograd. In March 1917, Emperor Nicholas II abdicated. A provisional government took power. The Romanov dynasty, after 300 years, no longer ruled Russia. Grand Duchess Vladimir was 62. Her palace still stood. Her sons were alive. Her jewels were still locked in the safe on the Neva. That summer, she left Petrograd for the south, for the spa town of Kislovodsk in the Caucasus Mountains, far from the unrest of the capital. Some of her sons joined her there. She did not take the jewels with her. The roads were uncertain. The trains were crowded with soldiers. Carrying a fortune in diamonds across a country in revolution seemed far more dangerous than leaving them behind, locked away in a hidden safe. It seemed, at the time, a sensible precaution. For 43 years, the 15 diamond circles had rested on the head of a woman who believed her family's world was permanent. The next person to touch them would be an Englishman working in the dark. The man who opened the safe was not a soldier, a diplomat, or a member of the imperial family. He was an antiques dealer. Albert Stopford, known to his friends as Bertie, was an Englishman in his late 50s with aristocratic relatives and a long career selling fine art and old objects to He had friends in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, and he moved easily between them. He had been in Russia for much of the war, and he kept a diary. In 1919, a London publisher would issue it without his name on the cover, as the Diary of an Unnamed Englishman in Petrograd. It remains one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of the Capitol and Revolution. Stopford was close to the Vladimir family. He was a regular at the palace and a friend of the Grand Duchess. And at some point in 1917, after she had gone south, she entrusted him with something no one else could do for her. She told him where the safe was. What happened next has been told many times and not every version agrees. The story most often repeated goes like this. In the autumn of 1917, with order breaking down in the capital, Stopford entered the Vladimir Palace with the help of a palace servant who had stayed loyal to the family. In some accounts, he was accompanied by the Grand Duchess's son, Grand Duke Boris, and the two men were disguised as workmen. They reached the private rooms, found the hidden safe, and opened it. They removed the jewels inside and left the safe as they had found it. Stopford then packed the jewels into two Gladstone bags, the hinged leather traveling bags carried by doctors and businessmen of the period, wide enough at the top to hold a great deal, and ordinary enough that no one would look at them twice. Parts of that story may be embellished. The disguises, the loyal servant, the exact date, and the question of who else was present are details that come from later retellings, and they cannot all be confirmed. What is documented is the outcome. The jewels left the Vladimir Palace, they left Russia, and they reached London, where they were put away for safekeeping on the Grand Duchess's behalf. The timing could hardly have been closer. On the night of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. In the months that followed, the new government nationalized the property of the imperial family and the nobility. Palaces were taken over, inventoried, and emptied. Much of the Romanov treasure that remained in Russia passed into the hands of the new state. Some of it would be sold abroad in the 1920s. Some would be broken up and melted. Some would be kept and remains in Moscow today. The Vladimir Palace was taken over with the rest. Its rooms were later given new uses. Whatever the new owners found inside, they did not find the contents of the Grand Duchess's safe. The family itself had nowhere left to go but away. Grand Duke Kyril had already left Russia, crossing into Finland in 1917 with his pregnant wife. Grand Duchess Vladimir stayed in the Caucasus with her younger sons, Boris and Andrei, as civil war spread across the country. For more than two years, the region changed hands between rival armies. Many members of the Romanov family were not as fortunate as the Vladimirs. The emperor, the empress, and their five children were killed in Yekaterinburg in July 1918. Several other grand dukes were killed in the months that followed. The grand duchess refused to leave Russia for as long as she possibly could. She was one of the last members of the imperial family to go. In early 1920, as the anti-Bolshevik forces in the south collapsed, she sailed from the Black Sea coast by most accounts from the small port of Anapa. On a ship bound for Italy. From there, she made her way to Switzerland and then to France. She was 66 years old. She had left St. Petersburg nearly three years earlier for what she believed would be a short stay in the mountains. That summer, she went to Contre-Seville, a spa town in eastern France. Her health had been failing since the journey out of Russia. On September 6, 1920, she died there. She never returned to the palace on the Neva. Whether she ever again held the tiara that Stopford had carried out in a leather bag, no record says. Her death turned the jewels into an inheritance, and the inheritance was divided among her four children. According to the accounts of later auction houses and family historians, each received a part of the collection by stone. Kirill, the eldest, received the sapphires. Boris received the emeralds. Andrei received the rubies. Elena, the only daughter, received the pearls and the diamonds. The 15 diamond circles, with their 15 pearls, went to Elena. The other stones began to scatter almost at once. Boris took his emeralds to Cartier. He sold the great emerald necklace his mother had received from Emperor Alexander II on her wedding. Cartier removed the stones from their Russian setting and remounted them as a sautoir, a long necklace worn draped from the neck to below the waist. The buyer was Edith Rockefeller McCormick of Chicago, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller. In 1927, Boris sold Cartier the companion piece, a brooch set with a step-cut emerald weighing more than 107 carats. A carat is the unit of weight for gemstones, one-fifth of a gram. After Edith McCormick died in 1932, Cartier bought the emeralds back. In the 1930s, they went to Barbara Hutton, the granddaughter of Frank Woolworth and one of the richest women in the United States. Hutton had them reset more than once. In 1947, Cartier used them in an emerald tiara made for her, which Cecil Beaton photographed her wearing. The emeralds that left the Vladimir Palace in the same bags as the pearl tiara ended up in Chicago and New York, cut loose Loose from every setting the Romanovs had given them. The tiara took a different road. By the early 1920s, Elena was in difficulty of her own. The Greek royal family had been forced into exile in 1917 during the First World War. It returned briefly in 1920 and would be forced out again in 1922. Prince Nicholas and his family lived largely in Paris. They had a title, three teenage daughters to raise, and very little income. Prince Nicholas, a talented amateur painter, would eventually sell his own work and give painting lessons to support his family. Elena now owned a tiara that had been made to be worn at the most lavish court in Europe. There were very few women left in Europe with the occasions, or the money, to wear it. One of them was the Queen of Great Britain. Queen Mary, the wife of King George V, was in her early 50s. She had been born a princess of Teck, a minor German title, into a branch of the British royal family that was perpetually short of money. As a young woman, she had watched her parents struggle with debts. As queen, she became one of the most serious collectors of jewelry and royal objects of the 20th century. She studied provenance, the documented chain of ownership of an object, with the attention of a professional. She kept records. She bought pieces that had left royal hands and brought them back into them. And she knew the Romanovs. The British and Russian royal families were linked by marriage. Queen Mary's husband was a first cousin of the murdered emperor. When Russian exiles began arriving in Western Europe with their jewels, Queen Mary was one of the buyers they approached, and one of the few who could afford what they had. In 1921, she bought the Vladimir tiara from Elena for 28,000 pounds. At the exchange rate of the time, that was roughly 110,000 American dollars. Adjusted for inflation, by one estimate, the price would be well over a million dollars today. It was a large sum. It was also, by some later accounts, considerably less than the tiara would have cost to make. Some writers have suggested that the exiles of the 1920s, in need of money and selling into a crowded market, received far less than their jewels were worth. Others point out that the tiara arrived in poor condition. Both observations can be true at once. The tiara was damaged. The journey from Petrograd had not been gentle. Some of the pearls and diamonds had come loose. Two of the diamonds were missing entirely, Lost somewhere between the safe on the Neva and the vault in London. Queen Mary sent the tiara to Gerard, the crown jewelers, for repairs. Then she began to change it. Queen Mary owned another collection of stones with a complicated family history of their own. They were known as the Cambridge Emeralds. They had been won by her grandmother, the Duchess of Cambridge, in a charity lottery in Germany in the early 19th century. They passed to Queen Mary's mother and then to her brother, Prince Francis of Teck. When Prince Francis died in 1910, his will left the emeralds to a woman outside the family with whom he had been close. Queen Mary arranged to buy them back. The episode is also the reason British royal wills began to be sealed, kept private by court order, a practice that continues today. In 1924, Queen Mary asked Ask Gerard to adapt the Vladimir tiara so that it could carry 15 of the Cambridge emeralds. The emeralds were cut as cabochons, smooth polished domed stones without facets, shaped like drops. Garrard made fittings so that the emeralds could hang inside the 15 diamond circles in place of the pearls. The tiara Boleyn had built for one look could now be worn three ways, with the pearls as the Grand Duchess had worn it, with the emeralds as no Romanov ever had, or empty, the circles alone, with nothing hanging inside them at all. It was a practical decision made by a careful collector. It was also the moment the tiara stopped being a Russian jewel that happened to be in England. It became an English jewel with a Russian past. The bags were opened in London. Two diamonds were gone. The pearls were counted and cleaned. New stones were fitted in the circles. The Grand Duchess was dead. Her palace belonged to the state. Her daughter had the money, the queen had the tiara. The Vladimir Tiara is still in London. It has never left the British royal family since the day Queen Mary bought it in 1921. Queen Mary wore it for the rest of her life in both its pearl and emerald forms. She wore it in the official portrait made for her husband's silver jubilee in 1935. The 25th anniversary of his reign with the pearls hanging inside the circles. She wore the emerald version with the jewels made for the Delhi Durbar of 1911. The great ceremony in India at which she and King George V were proclaimed Emperor and Empress of India. A Romanov tiara fitted with emeralds from a German lottery, worn with jewels made for India. By the 1930s, the 15 circles had become part of the most international jewel collection in Europe. When Queen Mary died in March 1953, she left the tiara to her granddaughter. Elizabeth had become queen 13 months earlier. She was 26 years old. For the next 69 years, the Vladimir tiara became one of the most photographed jewels in the world. Queen Elizabeth II wore it more often than almost any other tiara she owned. She wore it at state banquets, gala performances, and diplomatic receptions. She wore it in Paris in 1957, on state visits to Austria in 1969, and to Germany in 1978, and on tours of the Commonwealth. In February 2002, during a banquet in New Zealand, she wore it in its rarest form with no drops at all, the 15 diamond circles empty. It was a difficult month for her. Her sister, Princess Margaret, had died two weeks earlier. She wore it at moments that touched the United States as well. In June 2019, at the state banquet given at Buckingham Palace for the visiting American president, she chose the Vladimir tiara with its Cambridge emeralds. Americans who watched the coverage that evening saw, without being told, a jewel that had left Petrograd in a leather bag 102 years earlier. She wore it with emeralds in 2014, when the President of Ireland made the first state visit by an Irish head of state to Britain. And it is the tiara she was photographed wearing in the portrait King Charles III chose to release on the first anniversary of her death in September 2023. It was also, according to those who have traced her jewels, the last tiara Queen Elizabeth II was seen wearing in public. After the end of 2019, the state banquet stopped for the pandemic, and they did not resume in the same way during her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022. The Vladimir Tiara remains with the British royal family, among the jewels now in the care of King Charles III. When it will next be seen in public, and on whom, is for the royal household to decide. Its condition is good, it is complete. Its 15 pearls survive, as do its 15 Cambridge emeralds. But the tiara that exists today is not exactly the one Bolin made. Two of the original diamonds were lost on the journey from Russia and replaced. Garrard repaired it in 1921 and adapted it in 1924. And according to the official study of the late queen's diamonds written by Hugh Roberts, a former director of the Royal Collection, the frame of the tiara was entirely remade in 1988. The diamonds, the pearls, and the design are those of the Romanov tiara. The metal holding them together, by that account, is younger than many of the people who watch the queen wear it on television. The rest of the Grand Duchess's collection has had a very different afterlife. The jewels that Boris, Kirill, and Andre inherited were sold, reset, and scattered through the 1920s and after. Pieces have reappeared at auction throughout the past century. In 1987, a pair of emerald and diamond earrings that had belonged to the Grand Duchess Was sold by one of her direct descendants at Sotheby's in Geneva. When they appeared again at auction in New York in 2008, the catalog's main selling point was not the emeralds. It was the name of the woman who once wore them. That is the power of provenance, the documented chain of ownership that links a jewel to the people who owned it. A royal provenance can multiply the price of a jewel many times beyond the value of its stones and metal alone. A Romanov provenance with a documented escape from the revolution ...is among the most valuable in the jewelry market. The Vladimir tiara has the most famous provenance of any surviving Romanov jewel. It has never been offered for sale since 1921, and there is no sign that it ever will be. Even now, pieces from the old Vladimir collection keep surfacing. Decades after the Grand Duchess's death, a cache of her family's jewels and valuables was found in Stockholm, packed, according to the Cartier family's historian, into two pillowcases. It had been deposited there for safekeeping during the revolution and forgotten for most of a century. For an American who wants to see the Vladimir Tiara, there is no museum case to visit. It is not on permanent public display. What can be seen are the photographs, the Grand Duchess in her portrait sessions, Queen Mary in her 1935 Jubilee portrait, and six decades of images of Queen Elizabeth II, many of them in American newspaper and magazine archives. The closest relatives of the tiara that went to America are the Leeds Tiara, made by Cartier in 1913 for an heiress from Ohio, and the Grand Duchess's Emeralds, which passed through Chicago and New York in the collections of Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Barbara Hutton. There is one more detail in this story that almost nobody remembers. In 1934, Princess Marina of Greece, the youngest of Elena's three daughters, married Prince George, Duke of Kent, He was the fourth son of King George I and Queen Mary. The granddaughter of Grand Duchess Vladimir became Queen Mary's daughter-in-law. 13 years after Elena sold her mother's tiara to Queen Mary, Elena's own daughter married into the family that owned it. The tiara had left the Vladimir family. The Vladimir family, in a sense, followed it. The story of the Vladimir tiara is often told as a rescue. It is that. Without Bertie Stopford and his leather bags, the 15 circles would almost certainly have ended up in the hands of the new Soviet state. They might be in Moscow today. They might have been sold abroad in pieces in the 1920s or broken down for their stones. But it is also the story of how quickly a symbol becomes an asset. The tiara was made to show that an empire was permanent. Within four years of leaving Russia, it had been sold to pay for a family survival. Its owners changed, its stones changed, its frame was eventually rebuilt. What lasted was the design, 15 circles and something hanging inside each one, free to move. The empire that commissioned it lasted 43 years after the tiara was made. The tiara has now lasted more than a century beyond that empire. Somewhere in London tonight, behind a locked door in a royal strongroom, 15 pearls hang perfectly still inside their diamond circles, waiting for someone to turn her head. If this story stayed with you, the next one picks up the emeralds Queen Mary hung inside these circles, and the lottery ticket, the family quarrel, and the sealed will behind them. See you in the next one.