Princess Margaret’s Tiara Was Sold the Year She Died — For Less Than the House She Lost – HT
On June 13th, 2006, Christie’s King Street Sale Room in London opened its morning session with lot 4718180. The auctioneer’s description was precise. A diamond tiara fashioned in 11 separable elements, old cut and cushion-shaped diamond clusters alternating with scrolled cartouche motifs, set in silver and gold, made by the House of Garrard circa 1870.
Estimate £150,000 to £200,000. The hammer came down at £926,400. The buyer remained anonymous. The seller didn’t. Viscount Linley, David Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s only son, had consigned the piece along with approximately 800 other lots from his mother’s estate. She’d been dead for 4 years and 124 days.
And the tiara he’d just sold was the one she wore on her wedding day. 4 years isn’t the year she died. That gap is itself part of the story. The sale that closed in those King Street rooms in June 2006 had been set in motion in January 1959, completed in May 1960, photographed in 1962, and tested by everything that followed.
The Poltimore tiara, bought by Margaret herself at Sotheby’s, worn once on the most public day of her life, kept through the collapse of the marriage that day was meant to celebrate, is the single object that traces the entire arc of a marriage the Windsors spent 50 years pretending had been normal. A woman at an auction house in 1959, a bathtub in 1962, a hammer in 2006.
46 years of accumulated silence in between. On January 29th, 1959, a diamond tiara went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London. The consignor was the fourth Baron Poltimore. The contemporary Grantham Journal reported the transaction within weeks. A diamond tiara sent by Lord Poltimore, which was bought for £5,500 by a firm of London jewelers.
The buyer on record was that firm. The jewelers were acting as agents. The actual purchaser was Princess Margaret Rose, 28 years old, younger sister of the Queen, and at that moment not yet engaged, not yet officially linked to anyone, not yet anything she hadn’t already been for her entire life. She’d been advised to make the purchase by Patrick Plunket, 7th Baron Plunket, who served as Deputy Master of the Household to Queen Elizabeth II from 1954 until his death in 1975.
Plunket was the kind of courtier whose usefulness resided not in ceremony, but in anticipation. He understood the court’s internal logic precisely enough to navigate its edges. What he understood about Margaret’s situation, and what led him to flag the Sotheby’s lot to her attention, was that she needed something the institution couldn’t take back.
The rule being navigated around was this. Royal brides borrowed tiaras from the Crown’s jewel vault or received them from the monarch as gifts on the monarch’s authority. Margaret did neither. The Poltimore tiara, when she bought it through the intermediary jewelers, had no connection to the House of Windsor at all. It was Victorian aristocratic jewelry that had spent 90 years in a Bampfylde family’s possession, commissioned in 1870 for Florence Bampfylde, wife of the second Baron Poltimore, by Garrard of London, worn at the coronation of King
George and sold in 1959 because the Bampfylde line was doing what hundreds of English landowning families were doing in the postwar decades, liquidating what they could no longer afford to maintain. The second Baron, Augustus Frederick George Warwick Bampfylde, had served as Treasurer of the Household to Queen Victoria in the early 1870s, which gave the tiara a faint irony of provenance.
A piece made for the household of a Victorian politician who managed the Crown’s accounts, sold off by his successors when those accounts finally ran dry, purchased by an intermediary acting for a living monarch’s sister. Poltimore House itself, the Bampfylde family seat near Exeter, was by the 1950s already on its way toward the institutional conversion that would take it through a military hospital, a medical facility, and decades of managed decline.
The tiara wasn’t the last valuable thing the family had to sell. It was, from the outside, an unremarkable entry in the long ledger of British country house dispersal. From Margaret’s perspective, it was the opposite of unremarkable. Sara Prentice, creative director at the House of Garrard, told Vogue in 2020, “It’s such a modern thing.
We’re finding more and more now that women are purchasing for themselves, but way back in 1959, she chose it for herself. She must have loved it to do that.” The word modern is doing considerable work in that sentence. In 1959, within the structural grammar of royal womanhood, buying your own crown wasn’t modern. It was transgressive.
Not loudly, not in any way that required a press statement or a confrontation, but transgressive in the specific sense that it was an act of self-definition at a moment when Margaret’s identity was being decided for her by every institution around her. The tiara was built for permanence. Garrard had set the stones in both silver and gold, threading a brown ribbon through the framework so the band would sink into dark hair and render itself invisible, leaving only the diamonds floating above.
The design evoked the Victorian botanical fashions of the 1870s. Scrolled motifs around the central clusters. The whole piece graduated in height across its 11 elements. When fully assembled, it almost appeared to sit on nothing, sustained by its own internal structure. It could also be taken apart, reconfigured as a fringe necklace, as Margaret would wear it to the Royal Opera House in a pre-wedding outing, or disassembled entirely into 11 individual brooches.
She bought it 13 months before her engagement was publicly announced. The engagement to Antony Armstrong-Jones was declared on February 26th, 1960. The purchase had been made on January 29th, 1959. In those 13 months, no public record named her as the buyer. And that anonymity was the point. The regional press reported a sale. The national press apparently didn’t pick it up at all.
When the world finally learned who’d bought the Poltimore tiara, it learned it retrospectively because she was wearing it on her wedding day. On the 6th of May, 1960, the glass coach carrying Princess Margaret and the Duke of Edinburgh arrived at Westminster Abbey at 11:30 in the morning. The ceremony was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, and the Dean of Westminster, Eric Abbott.
Margaret walked down the aisle to “Christ is made the sure foundation” played to the Purcell tune “Westminster Abbey” at her specific request. The recessional she’d chosen was “Trumpet Tune and Airs”, also Purcell. Cecil Beaton took the official photographs. The V&A holds his contact prints from that day. The formal record of a ceremony that had, to that point in the 20th century, been witnessed by more people simultaneously than any other single public event in the world.
The dress Norman Hartnell had made was, by his own standards, deliberately stripped back. No embroidery, no applied motifs, no floral ornamentation of the kind that had characterized his earlier royal commissions. 30 m of silk organza, a fitted bodice, long sleeves, a full-length skirt with a small train. Life magazine called it the simplest royal wedding gown in history.
What Hartnell understood was that Margaret wasn’t asking for spectacle in the dress. The spectacle was what sat above it, above the silk organza and the diamond riviere of 34 old cut diamonds that had belonged to her grandmother, Queen Mary. The Poltimore tiara anchored 8 ft of bridal veil. It was appearing at its full height for the first time.
The transformation from Royal Opera House necklace to Westminster Abbey tiara, completed for the occasion it had been purchased for 14 months earlier. Beaton’s photographs show it precisely. The scrolled cartouche design rising above Margaret’s dark hair, the stones catching the Abbey’s light in the way a piece designed in 1870 specifically to float above the wearer’s head, was constructed to do.
The brown ribbon thread was invisible in the framework, exactly as Gerard had intended. Armstrong-Jones stood at the altar in morning dress. He was the most watched commoner in the British monarchy’s history at that moment. The first time in 400 years that a daughter of a British king had married outside the aristocracy.
His background wasn’t aristocratic, but it wasn’t random, either. His uncle was Oliver Messel, the theatrical designer whose sets had defined post-war London stage production. He’d trained as a photographer under Sterling Henry Nahum, who worked professionally as Baron, and had built a career photographing the upper classes for the Sunday Times.
Cambridge-educated, socially fluent, professionally established. Unconventional enough to register as a departure from royal tradition, not unconventional enough to be genuinely unfamiliar. The wedding was the first royal wedding to be broadcast on television. An estimated 300 million viewers watched worldwide, 20 million of those in the United Kingdom, based on the figures the BBC and multiple subsequent accounts have cited.
Richard Dimbleby covered it for the BBC alongside Jean Metcalfe, Anne Edwards, Brian Johnston, and Wynford Vaughan Thomas. Vogue described Britain as thrilled. The public narrative assembled itself instantly. The Queen’s glamorous younger sister and the free-spirited photographer who’d seen through the protocol to the person underneath.
What the 300 million viewers couldn’t have known, what couldn’t be reported in May 1960, and wasn’t confirmed until 2004, was that on 26th May 1960, 20 days after the wedding, while Margaret and Armstrong-Jones were on their six-week Caribbean honeymoon aboard HMY Britannia, a woman named Camilla Fry gave birth to a daughter.
Camilla Fry was the wife of Jeremy Fry, the man who’d been announced as Armstrong-Jones’s best man before a prior criminal conviction for importuning forced him to withdraw from the role. Armstrong-Jones agreed to a paternity test in 2004, confirming the child was his. The marriage began carrying a secret before it had properly begun.
The tiara that morning had no way of knowing that. Neither did the 300 million people watching. Two years into the marriage, in their apartment at Kensington Palace, Armstrong-Jones took a photograph of his wife in a bathtub. She was wearing the Poltimore tiara and nothing else. He was visible in a mirror within the frame.
The husband behind the lens, caught in the glass, present in the image he was constructing. Start with what’s confirmed. The photographer was Armstrong-Jones, not Cecil Beaton. Beaton photographed Margaret throughout her life, and she remembered him with evident warmth. “I really adored him, because he was always very tender with me, very sweet to me,” she said.
But the bathtub photograph was Armstrong-Jones’s work. His reflection is visible in the mirror in the image. Every source that has addressed the attribution is in agreement on this point. Armstrong-Jones was a professional photographer before the marriage and remained one throughout it. His archive is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
He’d trained under Nahum, built a career photographing the British upper classes for the Sunday Times, and continued working professionally as a photographer after the marriage and after the divorce. His professional practice was the controlled arrangement of subjects within frames he’d designed. When he pointed a camera at his wife in their Kensington Palace bathroom in 1962, he wasn’t fumbling with a domestic camera in a private moment.
He was making an image. The distinction matters. The tiara’s presence in that image carries weight, he must have understood. Margaret had purchased it herself through an intermediary, with no obligation to any vault or dynasty. It was hers in a way that almost nothing else in her life was hers. Not the apartment, which was allocated by the Crown, not her public role, which was assigned by birth, not the diamond riviere from Queen Mary, which was a dynastic piece rather than a personal purchase. The Poltimore tiara
was hers by market transaction, which in her particular context was as close to self-determination as the structure allowed. By the time Armstrong-Jones photographed her wearing it in a bathtub, that piece had been attached to a public occasion of 300 million viewers, and was now being attached to a private occasion that no one outside those rooms knew existed.
The crown that had floated above her veil in full national broadcast was now resting on her hair in a domestic interior, with her husband’s reflection framed in the mirror behind her. That combination, the institutional symbol worn with total undress, the photographer present in his own image, the private redeployment of a very public object, doesn’t settle into a single reading.
It might be playful, two people in a marriage that still had warmth in it, finding a joke in the absurdity of Victorian diamonds in a bathtub. It might be controlling, a professional photographer imposing his framing on a subject who was also his wife, using the thing she’d chosen as her symbol of independence as a prop in an image he built and retained.
It might be something quieter, a document of intimacy between two people who understood that the image would stay private. Armstrong-Jones held it private for 44 years. Whatever he intended when he took it, he spent four decades deciding the world didn’t need to see it. Craig Brown, in his 2017 account of Margaret’s life, described the marriage’s domestic texture with specificity that the palace’s language had never allowed.
“Home alone, they sniped and bickered,” Brown wrote. “Snowdon would shut himself away in his studio telling her, ‘Never come in here without knocking.’ When she asked him if he’d be in for lunch, he pretended not to hear. And before a grand party or a public engagement, he would make a point of reducing the princess to tears, ensuring that she would appear puffy-faced and red-eyed on arrival.
” There were the notes, short, written, deliberately cruel, left for her to find. The most notorious, which Brown’s account records and which made it into Helena Bonham Carter’s performance in The Crown, read, “You look like a Jewish manicurist, and I hate you.” Brown’s account was published in 2017, 55 years after the photograph was taken.
Whether the marriage in 1962 already had that specific texture or acquired it gradually across the following years can’t be established from the available documents. What the record does confirm is that by February 1967, Armstrong-Jones was already denying divorce rumors to the Times of London. “It’s news to me, and I would be the first to know if it were true.
” And the formal separation announcement came in March 1976. The distance between the bathtub photograph and the separation announcement was 14 years. The domestic reality described by Brown was accumulating throughout all of them. The bathtub photograph wasn’t shown publicly until 2006, the same year the tiara was auctioned.
Armstrong-Jones held it privately for 44 years, through the marriage’s visible deterioration, the separation, the divorce, Margaret’s health decline, and her death in February 2002. He released it publicly in 2006, four years after she died. Whether the timing was coordinated with the Christie’s sale or coincidental, or simply a private decision about when a private image had been private long enough, no available source confirms.
After Armstrong-Jones died on January 13th, 2017, aged 86, his family withdrew the photograph from public view. It hasn’t been reproduced since. The image that documented the interior of the marriage, made by the husband of the wife in the years the marriage was presenting itself to the world as a fairy tale, was suppressed twice.
First for 44 years by the man who made it, then permanently by the family he left behind. The photograph, like the tiara, has now disappeared. By the time the formal separation was announced in March 1976, the marriage had been unraveling for most of a decade. In February 1976, paparazzi photographs of Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior she’d met through Colin and Anne Tennant in 1973, appeared in a British tabloid after the pair were photographed on a beach at Mustique. The
images were tame by any later standard. The consequence wasn’t. The Kensington Palace separation statement was constructed carefully. HRH the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon have mutually agreed to live apart. The princess will carry out her public duties and functions unaccompanied by Lord Snowdon.
There are no plans for a divorce proceeding. The Queen’s office followed with its own statement, specifically noting that the Queen hadn’t pressured either party toward any particular course. Which is the kind of denial that signals the question had been asked and required an answer. Lord Napier, Margaret’s personal secretary, had relayed the news that Snowdon was leaving her on the telephone, speaking in coded language on an insecure line.
She reportedly said that it was the best news he had ever given her. Armstrong-Jones had been conducting extramarital relationships throughout the marriage, most visibly with a Vogue editor named Pamela Colin. Margaret’s own relationship with Llewellyn had been public knowledge since the February 1976 tabloid coverage.
The divorce petition was filed on May 10th, 1978. The decree absolute was granted on July 11th, 1978. The Times of London reported that the court proceeding lasted 1 minute and 53 seconds. Royal households have always maintained personal inventories of their jewelry, detailed records of what exists, what it’s insured for, where it’s stored, and what occasions particular pieces are associated with.
Whatever form Margaret’s household records took, they reflected for the duration of the marriage and years beyond, an actively worn piece. She’d worn the Poltimore Tiara at the Shah of Iran’s state visit in May 1977, 1 year before the divorce was finalized, and one of the more prominent state occasions of that year. She wore it at state banquets, at gala ballet performances, at state openings of Parliament.
Multiple accounts describe it as the tiara she wore most frequently throughout her adult life. The divorce didn’t change that. The tiara hadn’t been received from the crown and couldn’t be returned to it. The decree absolute of July 1978 couldn’t touch it. Anne de Courcy, whose 2008 biography of Armstrong-Jones drew on over 90 taped interviews, described him as having been cruel to Margaret during their divorce proceedings, while also noting he remained her staunchest defender when anyone criticized her.
Both characterizations appear simultaneously accurate. Armstrong-Jones’ public framing of the marriage’s end was, predictably, arranged for minimum damage. “The divorce had been painless,” he told one interviewer. “We never really fell out.” The palace’s posture matched his. Reasonable adults, no royal pressure, amicable parting.
The Queen, naturally, very sad. No further comment. Five months after the decree absolute, on December 15th, 1978, Armstrong-Jones married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, a film production assistant 14 years his junior. That marriage also ended in divorce in 2000. The pattern of publicly managed language around both marriages was consistent. Everything had been amicable.
Everyone had wished everyone else well. Nothing had been as difficult as it might appear. After the divorce, Margaret came back to the apartment she and Armstrong-Jones had moved into in the early 1960s, Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace, 20 rooms across four stories in the main building of the palace. The entrance hall had intricate cornicing and black and white flagstones.
The entertaining rooms had large open fireplaces and tall windows overlooking the walled garden. Five reception rooms, three main bedrooms, dressing rooms, bathrooms, a night nursery, a day nursery, and staff quarters. It had been sized for a family household with a full social calendar. When William and Kate eventually moved in after a reported 1 million pounds renovation in 2013, a source described it to a reporter as beautiful, with huge black and white flagstones and large open fireplaces in all the main entertaining rooms.
Those were the rooms Margaret had occupied since before her children were born. She occupied them alone for the 24 years between the divorce and her death. The children had their own households. Armstrong-Jones had remarried. The apartment was hers by crown allocation, unlike the tiara, which had been hers by purchase, a distinction that felt more significant the longer the divorce receded.
And she lived in it as a woman who’d had the use of 20 rooms and gradually required fewer of them. Her social life in the early post-divorce years wasn’t empty. She continued official engagements, continued the Mustique visits, continued the dinners and the close circle of friends who’d been part of her adult life for decades.
Les Jolies Eaux, the 10-acre Mustique villa that Colin Tennant had given her as a wedding present in 1960, designed by Oliver Messel on a hillside above the Caribbean, remained her retreat from the formal weight of the palace until 1996. Messel was Armstrong-Jones’ uncle, the theatrical designer whose eye had defined the post-war British stage.
He’d built Margaret’s Caribbean retreat, and the man whose cruelty she’d spent 18 years negotiating had been built, partly, from Messel’s sensibility. There’s a specific irony in that provenance that the geography makes visible. In 1996, Margaret gave Les Jolies Eaux to her son, David Linley, as a wedding present.
In 1999, the same year she was badly scalded in a bathroom accident on Mustique, Linley sold it for a reported 2 million dollars. The hammer price of the Poltimore Tiara in 2006 was 926,400 pounds, which converted to approximately 1.7 million dollars at the exchange rates of the time. The tiara sold for less than the house.
Whether she’d lost the house is more complicated than that arithmetic suggests. She gave it to her son. She didn’t lose it in the divorce. The dispersal was her own act rather than something done to her, but the pattern is visible. The Mustique property given away in 1996, sold in 1999 for 2 million dollars.
The tiara sold in 2006 for 926,400 pounds. The will at death valued at 7.7 million pounds gross, lower than earlier estimates of 12 million pounds. The costs of being who she was had accumulated in ways that never appeared in the official record. The health decline had begun earlier and built steadily. In January 1985, surgeons removed part of her left lung. She stopped smoking.
Her health declined regardless. In 1998, at her Mustique home, she suffered a mild stroke. In February 1999, she was badly scalded getting into a bath. Burns to her feet, described by at least one account as never fully healing. She was flown from Mustique to a hospital in Barbados. She was 68 years old and had been the most watched commoner bride in the world 39 years earlier.
The burns changed her mobility permanently. The island visits that had defined her adult life became impossible. The social calendar that had kept the 20 rooms of Apartment 1A populated, the dinners, the houseguests, the informal evenings that were her actual medium, the thing she was genuinely good at beneath the official functions she tolerated, contracted.
In April 2001, the cumulative effects of her strokes began to affect her eyesight. By that point, she’d been largely immobile for 2 years. She told journalists, when asked about her public image, that “Everything I have to say is visible in my face.” That’s not quite accurate as a biographical method.
The face had been managed and managed well for decades. But as a statement about her attitude toward the official record, it has a specific precision. She wasn’t interested in offering the narration. She expected the observer to do the work. On February 8th, 2002, she suffered another stroke. On February 9th, 2002, aged 71, Princess Margaret died at King Edward VII’s hospital in London of cardiac complications. She’d never remarried.
She left behind the 20-room apartment, an estate to be settled, a collection of jewelry and Fabergé and silver and furniture and works of art accumulated over a lifetime. And the Poltimore Tiara, still hers, still in the apartment, still carrying everything it had accumulated since January 1959. The estate was valued for probate at 7,700,176 pounds gross, 7,603,596 pounds after liabilities.
The inheritance tax liability was estimated at approximately 3.1 to 3.5 million pounds. Earlier estimates circulating before the probate figure had been as high as 12 million pounds. The actual figure was lower, reflecting prior asset disposals and the costs of a decade of sustained health management. The principal beneficiaries were Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto.
The Queen wasn’t a beneficiary. Shortly after Margaret’s death, the will was sealed by court order, along with the Queen Mother’s will, which was probated within weeks, and it hasn’t been made publicly available since. The Cambridge Law Journal confirmed both sealings. Whether the Poltimore Tiara was specifically named in Margaret’s instructions, or whether it passed under a general personal property clause directed toward her children, can’t be confirmed from any available source.
The document that would resolve that question is the sealed document that can’t be read. That sealing is itself a fact worth marking. The woman who bought her own tiara before her engagement, who kept it through the marriage and the divorce and the health failures and the last years alone in 20 rooms, left instructions that no one outside her immediate family can access.
The institution that spent decades managing the narrative of her marriage sealed the will that might have clarified what she’d intended for its most visible symbol. Both of those acts, the purchase in 1959 and the sealing in 2002, are consistent with a pattern. She controlled what she could and what she couldn’t control was controlled for her.
Christie’s brought the Poltimore Tiara out for public preview on June 9th, 2006, 4 days before the first sale date. The Guardian reported that morning, “Jewelry belonging to the late Princess Margaret, including the tiara she wore at her wedding, went on public display today ahead of being put up for auction. Approximately 800 lots, jewelry, Fabergé, silver, furniture, works of art, had been assembled from apartment 1A.
Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto had consigned the collection specifically, the Deseret News reported, to pay an estimated 5.5 million dollars in inheritance taxes.” Christie’s press release described the Poltimore Tiara as “originally created by royal jeweler Garrard in 1870 for Lady Poltimore. The provenance note traced the chain from Florence and filed through Sotheby’s on 29th January 1959, where it was bought for 5,500 pounds through Margaret’s ownership and the Westminster Abbey wedding of 6th May 1960. The estimate was 150,000 pounds to
200,000 pounds, set by Christie’s jewelry department against their assessment of what material value plus documented celebrity provenance would attract. On June 13th, 2006, the morning sale opened. The bidding for lot 4718180 opened against its estimate of 150,000 pounds and didn’t stop. The hammer came down at 926,400 pounds, nearly five times the upper estimate.
The full two-day sale across both sessions returned approximately 10 million pounds. Other lots performed dramatically above estimate. An anonymous buyer paid over 2.2 million dollars for a Fabergé clock in the same sale, the second highest price ever paid for any Fabergé clock at auction. The tiara was nonetheless the transaction that defined the room.
Academic analyses of celebrity provenance auctions have documented consistently that association with specific named individuals drives prices above material value, and the 2006 Margaret sale is itself one of the case studies cited in that literature. What the bidders were paying for was a chain of custody, Garrard to Bamford to Sotheby’s 1959 to Margaret’s hands to Westminster Abbey to Kensington Palace to Christie’s 2006 that placed every event in the object’s history inside a verified documentary record.
Two or more bidders drove the price to 926,400 pounds. At that point, one of them decided it was enough. The buyer remained anonymous. Press reports at the time described a private buyer from Asia. One source identified more specifically as a bidder from China, though that attribution appears in a single account and Christie’s hasn’t commented publicly.
The buyer has never been identified. The tiara has never been photographed since the sale. Its current location is unknown. In the same year, Armstrong Jones exhibited the 1962 bathtub photograph publicly for the first time. He’d held it privately for 44 years through the marriage, the divorce, Margaret’s declining health and her death.
He released it publicly in 2006, the same year the tiara was auctioned. Whether that timing was coordinated with the estate or simply coincidental, can’t be confirmed from any available document. Two conflicting accounts exist in the biographical record about whether Margaret specifically directed Linley to sell the tiara or whether he made the call on his own judgment.
Neither account has been traced to a primary source, not to a letter, not to a confirmed passage in the sealed will, not to any verifiable statement from either child. The sealed will is the document that would resolve this, and the sealed will can’t be read. This script doesn’t resolve it because the evidence doesn’t allow resolution.
What the evidence does establish is a transaction that occurred on a specific date for a specific price driven by a specific tax liability. Linley and Chatto planned to use the proceeds to pay an estimated 5.5 million dollars in inheritance taxes. The whole sale raised approximately 10 million pounds. The tiara raised 926,400 pounds.
The arithmetic worked regardless of whose precise instruction set it in motion. Whether she wanted it sold or whether her son decided it, the practical result was the same. The object that had been present at every pivotal moment of the marriage passed into permanent private possession. The crown bought at a public auction in January 1959, worn at a public wedding in May 1960, photographed in a private bathroom in 1962, worn to a state visit in 1977, kept through 18 years of marriage and 24 years of widowhood in a 20-room
apartment, was sold in June 2006 to a man whose name no auction catalog confirms. The marriage it witnessed lasted 18 years and produced two children. It wasn’t a fraud from its first day. People don’t maintain 18 years without other elements present. What it was, as the record establishes, was a marriage between two people accustomed to being the primary focus of attention, who competed with each other in ways that became destructive and whose private reality was managed institutionally and individually with a consistency that ran
from the 1960s through the palace’s careful separation statement of 1976 through Armstrong Jones’s public insistence that the divorce had been painless. The official silence wasn’t a conspiracy. British royal image management of that period was rarely organized enough to be that. It was a default posture, the familiar institutional preference for the language of amicable resolution over the language of what had actually happened.
The protection the institution offered Margaret took the form of managing the story rather than naming it, and what got managed out of the story was the account of what the marriage had cost her, not romantically, but materially and existentially in terms of the specific shape of the last 24 years of her life in a 20-room apartment in Kensington Palace.
Objects don’t have knowledge, but objects do have provenance, and provenance is the documentary record of everything that’s happened to something since it was made. The Poltimore Tiara’s provenance runs from Garrard’s workshop in 1870 to Florence Bamford’s hair, to the coronation of George V, to a Sotheby’s sale room in January 1959, to Margaret’s intermediary, to Margaret’s own hands, to the Royal Opera House necklace appearance, to the Norman Hartnell wedding veil in Westminster Abbey, to the reflection in a Kensington Palace
bathroom mirror in 1962, to the Shah of Iran’s state visit in 1977, to storage in apartment 1A, to Christie’s King Street on 13th June 2006, to the anonymous buyer who hasn’t been photographed with it since. That chain doesn’t need anyone’s permission to tell. It wasn’t sealed when Margaret died. The market in June 2006 knew exactly what it contained and bid accordingly.
In 1960, the Poltimore Tiara sat on Margaret’s head as she walked down the aisle at Westminster Abbey in front of 300 million television viewers. In 2006, it sat in a locked case at Christie’s as a man in a gray suit bought it and walked out. The buyer has never been identified. The tiara has never been photographed since.