crown jewels
crown jewels, adornments and regalia that are used during a monarch’s coronation and that can be worn by members of royalty for other official state occasions. Crown jewels can also include collections of jewelry assembled over time by European monarchs—not as private possessions, but as treasures belonging to their royal houses and the offices they held..
The practice of assembling new pieces of jewelery as a display of wealth and power is less visible in the 21st century—Camilla, queen consort of Charles III, for example, did not have a crown made for his coronation in 2023 but reused Mary of Teck’s coronation crown. But as this example shows, crown jewels remain in collections and continue to be worn on occasions today. The term crown jewels, however, can be a bit misleading. For example, Ireland’s so-called crown jewels, which were stolen from Dublin Castle in 1907 and never recovered, were not linked to any coronation and did not even include a crown. Instead, they consisted of the jeweled star and collars of the Order of St. Patrick, along with a diamond brooch.
Over the centuries many royal jewelry collections have been assembled, seized, sold, or scattered. Yet records and illustrations of some of the most spectacular pieces have survived. For instance, watercolor drawings on vellum from 1475 show four magnificent jeweled ornaments that Edward IV, king of England (1461–70 and 1471–83) gave to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, on the occasion of the Duke’s marriage to Edward’s sister Margaret. Another example is a 17th-century inventory of the treasures of the abbey of Saint-Denis in France that includes engraved illustrations of many valuable objects that were dispersed through sale or theft during the French Revolutionary period. Napoleon I traced and recovered only some of the missing objects, but in 1887 most of the collection was sold at public auction.
Similarly, the magnificent collection of crown jewels, mostly diamonds, owned by the tsars of Russia was cataloged and illustrated in 1926, when the Soviet government proposed to sell the collection in its entirety. Some pieces reached London auction houses, but most remained in Russia and are now displayed in the Kremlin in Moscow. Similarly, royal houses in Saxony, Bavaria, and Portugal built impressive jewelry collections—including diamond brooches, badges, necklaces, orders, tiaras, sword-hilts, and coronets—that can still be admired today in Dresden, Munich, and Lisbon, respectively.