July 29th, 1981. St. Paul’s Cathedral. 750 million people watched a shy 20-year-old walk down the aisle toward the Prince of Wales. The story everyone told was simple. A kindergarten teacher marrying the heir to the throne, Cinderella in real life. 3 months before that wedding, a consultant to Burke’s puridge examined Diana’s ancestry.
His conclusion should have shattered the fairy tale completely. Diana, he said, had more English royal blood than Prince Charles himself, more royal than the future king. The claim sounds absurd until you understand what it means. The House of Windsor didn’t exist until 1917. Before that, the royal family was called Saxon Corborg and Gortar German.
They changed the name during World War I because fighting Germany with a German surname was becoming awkward. The Spencers had been English nobility since 1508, nearly 500 years. While the ancestors of the Windsor were minor German princes, the Spencers were fighting in English civil wars and advising English monarchs.
Diana wasn’t marrying up. She was bringing something back that the royal family had lost centuries ago. This is the story of two bloodlines. One came from Germany. One never left England. Diana Spencer was not born into obscurity. She was born into Alth House sits on 13,000 acres in Northamptonshire.
The Spencer family has owned it since 1508 when Sir John Spencer, a wealthy sheep farmer, purchased the estate. That was 9 years before Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the church door. The Spencers were already landed gentry before the Protestant Reformation began. For five centuries, the family accumulated titles, influence, and connections to the crown.
They weren’t just aristocrats. They were fixtures of English power. Diana’s father, John Spencer, was the eighth Earl Spencer. He was god’s son to Queen Mary, the grandmother of Elizabeth II. He served as personal equary to both King George V 6th and the young Queen Elizabeth. The Spencers didn’t just know the royal family, they worked for them.
Diana’s maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was even closer. She served as lady and waiting to the queen mother for decades. The two women were intimate friends. When Diana was being considered as a bride for Charles, it was Lady Fermoy who helped arrange the match. The family service to the crown stretch back centuries.
Henry Spencer, the first Earl of Sunderland, fought for King Charles I during the English Civil War. He died at the Battle of Newbury in 1643. Killed defending the monarchy against Cromwell’s forces. The Spencers bled for their kings. Through marriage, they connected to even greater power. Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Malbor, was linked to the Spencer family when her daughter married the third Earl of Sunderland.
Sarah was Queen Anne’s closest confidant and at one point the richest woman in England. Her husband, the Duke of Malra, was the greatest military commander of his age. By the time Diana was born in 1961, the Spencer family tree was dense with dukes, soldiers, and statesmen. A consultant to Burke’s Puridge put it simply, “There cannot be another family so stiff with royal connections.
” Diana earned the title lady in 1975 when her father inherited the Eldom, but she had been aristocracy from birth. She grew up on the Sandringham estate, playing with princes Andrew and Edward as a child. The royal family wasn’t foreign territory. It was her neighborhood. And yet the most remarkable thing about Diana’s ancestry wasn’t her titles. It was her blood.
Because hidden in that family tree were connections far more significant than any connections that led directly to the bed chambers of kings. In 1981, Time magazine revealed a detail about Diana’s ancestry that most royal watchers had overlooked. Three of her ancestors had been mistresses to English kings.
Charles II was known as the merry monarch. He returned to England in 1660 after years of exile, restored the throne his father had lost and proceeded to enjoy himself thoroughly. He married Catherine of Banza, a Portuguese princess, but she never gave him children. His mistresses did, at least 14 of them. Charles II’s illegitimate offspring became the foundations of some of Britain’s most powerful families.
His affairs produced more than a quarter of all the dukedoms in Great Britain and Ireland. When aristocrats today trace their lineage, an alarming number of them end up in Charles II’s bedroom. Diana descended from two of his mistresses directly. The first was Barbara Villas, the king’s most famous lover, a woman so beautiful and so scandalous that she dominated court gossip for years.
She bore Charles a son, Henry Fitzroy, in 1663. He was created Duke of Grafton at age 12. His descendants eventually married into the Spencer line through Diana’s great grandmother, Adelaide Seymour. The second was Louise Deeray, a French noble woman sent to the English court by Louis I 14th, possibly as a spy. Charles II was captivated.
Their son, Charles Lennox, was born in 1672 and made Duke of Richmond at age 3. His bloodline reached Diana through her other great grandmother, Rosalind Bingham. The third was Arabella Churchill, daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, the original one, not the prime minister. Arabella was mistress not to Charles II, but to his brother James II.
She bore James a daughter, and that bloodline too wound its way through the centuries until it reached the Spencer family. Through these women, Diana carried Stuart blood. The Stewarts had ruled England and Scotland before the Hannavarians arrived. They were the dynasty of Mary, Queen of Scots, of Charles I, who lost his head, of Charles II, who got it back.
Their blood ran through Diana’s veins, passed down through passion rather than marriage, but royal nonetheless. The irony was striking. Diana’s royal ancestry was technically illegitimate. Charles’s was technically legitimate, but hers was English. His was German. And there was one more connection, one that remains debated to this day.
A connection that if true would mean TUDA blood returned to the throne through Diana’s son. Diana was the 13th great granddaughter of Mary Berlin. That name should sound familiar. Mary was the older sister of Anne Berlin, the woman who changed English history. Anne became Henry VIII’s second wife, gave birth to the future Elizabeth I, and lost her head on Tower Green in 1536.
But before Henry ever noticed Anne, he had already taken Mary to his bed. Mary Berlin was Henry VIII’s mistress for several years in the early 1520s. The affair was not secret. Henry later admitted it publicly when he needed a papal dispensation to marry Anne. He had slept with the sister which created a legal impediment to marrying the other.
The church had rules about such things. During her affair with the king, Mary gave birth to two children, a daughter Catherine born around 1524, a son Henry born in 1526. Both were officially the children of Mary’s husband, William Kerry, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber. But were they really? The timing is suspicious.
Catherine Kerry was born squarely within the period of Mary’s affair with the king. Some historians believe she was Henry VII’s daughter, not William K’s. If true, that would make Diana a direct descendant of the TUDA king himself. The evidence is circumstantial but compelling. Henry VIII showered William Kerry with grants and favors during the affair far beyond what a minor courtier would normally receive.
When Kerry died of sweating sickness in 1528, the king personally arranged for the children’s care. Catherine later received an advantageous marriage despite her family’s disgrace after Anne’s execution. and Elizabeth I showed extraordinary favor to both Kerry children throughout her reign, treating them almost as siblings rather than cousins.
Historian Allison Weir examined the evidence and concluded that Catherine was likely Henry’s daughter. Others disagree. Henry never acknowledged her and without DNA evidence, we cannot know for certain. What we do know is this. Diana descended from Mary Berlin through Katherine Kerry’s line.
The bloodline is documented. The connection to the Berlin family is beyond dispute. And here is where it gets interesting. Prince William and Prince Harry carry double Berlin ancestry. Through their father Charles, they descend from Margaret Tuda, Henry VIII’s sister, giving them a legitimate Tuda connection. Through their mother Diana, they descend from Mary Berlin, giving them a second path to the same family.
If Katherine Kerry was indeed Henry VIII’s daughter, then William and Harry are his descendants twice over through legitimate and illegitimate lines through two sisters. Anne Berlin was executed. Her bloodline supposedly ended when Elizabeth I died childless in6003, but her sister Mary’s bloodline survived quietly for 5 centuries.
It sounds as English as Westminster Abbey or the Tower of London. The House of Windsor was invented on July 17th, 1917. Before that date, the British royal family had a different name, Sax Cobberg Gotha. The name came from Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband. Albert was German, born in the small duche of Sax Cobberg and Gotha.
When he married Victoria in 1840, their children technically belonged to his house, not hers. When their son Edward IIIth became king in 1901, he founded the Sax Cobberg Gotha dynasty on the British throne. For 16 years, no one much cared. Then came World War I. By 1917, Britain had been fighting Germany for 3 years.
Millions of young men were dying in the trenches. Anti-German sentiment was vicious. German shops were burned. Daxonss were stoned in the streets. Families with German surnames anglicized them overnight. And on the throne sat a king with one of the most German names imaginable. King George V faced a problem. His cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II was the enemy.
They shared a grandmother in Queen Victoria. The same blood ran through both their veins. The king’s own surname announced this connection to everyone. So George V did something unprecedented. He erased his family’s German identity by royal proclamation. Saxobberg Gotha became Windsor. His relatives followed suit.
The Battenburggs became the Mount Battons. German titles were dropped. German connections were buried. Kaiser Wilhelm reportedly found this amusing. He joked that he was looking forward to attending a performance of the Merry Wives of Sax Cobberg Gotha. The name change worked. Windsor sounded English. Windsor Castle had been a royal residence for nearly a thousand years.
The association stuck. Within a generation, people forgot the family had ever been called anything else. But a name change doesn’t change blood. The Windsor remained what they had always been, descendants of the House of Hanover. The Hannavarians arrived in Britain in 1714. Queen Anne, the last of the Stearts, had died without surviving children.
Parliament needed a Protestant heir. They passed over more than 50 Catholics with stronger claims and settled on George, elector of Hanover, a German prince who barely spoke English. George I communicated with his ministers in French. He spent much of his reign trying to get back to Hanover. He was king of England essentially by accident of religion.
His descendants have sat on the throne ever since. George II, George III, George I 4th, William I 4th, Victoria, Edward II, George V, Edward VII, George V 6th, Elizabeth II, Charles III. A direct line from a German elector who never wanted to be English in the first place. The Spencers, meanwhile, had been at Halthorp since 1508.
They had never been anything but English. When Diana married Charles, even his own family noticed the contrast. The Queen Mother privately called Philillip the Hun. She recognized the German blood. She had married into it herself. July 29th, 1981. St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. A congregation of 3,500 guests.
a global television audience approaching 3/4 of a billion people. Every detail was choreographed. The 25- ft train, the horsedrawn carriage, the kiss on the balcony that became the defining image of the decade. But behind the spectacle, something else was happening. The palace knew exactly who Diana was. It was a careful selection.
Finding a bride for the Prince of Wales was not simple. She had to be aristocratic, but not too aristocratic. Protestant, virginal, or at least presumed so. Free of scandal, young enough to bear children, old enough to handle the pressure. The pool of candidates was vanishingly small, and Diana Spencer checked every box. Her family had been vetted for generations.
Her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, was the Queen Mother’s closest friend. Her father had served two monarchs personally. The Spencers were known quantities, trusted insiders who understood how the palace worked. Diana hadn’t stumbled into Charles’s life by accident. She had grown up on the Sandringham estate, quite literally next dPrincess Diana’s Private Jewelry: The Personal Pieces Outside the Royal Vault – YouTube
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Princess Diana was known to the world not because of royal jewelry, but as one of the most influential and widely discussed women of her time. Even though those jewels became part of her public image, she also wore pieces that belonged to the crown and were given to her for use by Queen Elizabeth II, including legendary tiaras such as the Cambridge Lovers’ Knot Tiara, the Cambridge Emerald Choker, and other historic jewels of the British monarchy.
But alongside this, there was a completely different collection, far more personal. It was formed in parallel with the royal heirlooms, yet it seemed to live its own life. Some pieces were wedding gifts from foreign monarchs and remained her personal property. Others were specially commissioned for her, gifted by friends, lent by acquaintances, or personally purchased.
Especially during the period when her life began to change after the separation in 1992 and the divorce in 1996. An especially intimate chapter of this story includes gifts from Dodi Fayed, with whom Diana spent the final months of her life. Among them, according to reports, were pieces of jewelry that added an even more private layer to her personal collection.
After her death on August 31st, 1997, most of this private collection was passed to Princes William and Harry, according to a letter of wishes attached to her will, with the hope that one day these pieces would be worn by their future wives. Some items were not her property at all, only borrowed pieces, later returned to their rightful owners.
And part of this story remains forever tied to that night in Paris, ending in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, where some of her belongings were recovered. And through all of this, we can see a different Diana, not a symbol, not a title, but a woman slowly reclaiming her own voice even in the smallest details of her life.
And today, we explore her private jewelry collection and the stories hidden behind the sparkle of each piece. Please subscribe to the channel. It truly means a lot. And don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments below. I read every single one, and I’m genuinely curious to know how you felt about this story. The Attallah Cross.
The cross is almost comically large for a piece of jewelry. Roughly 5.4 in tall and nearly 4 in wide, made by Garrard around 1920 as a private one-off commission. A fleury style pendant set with square-cut amethysts in a diamond frame, mounted in gold and silver. It was created for an unnamed client, returned to Garrard’s stock, and eventually purchased in the 1980s by a man named Naim Attallah, a Palestinian-born publisher who ran Asprey and Garrard.
Attallah and Diana became personal friends. She would visit him at Garrard’s Regent Street headquarters, the kind of easy, private errand that rarely makes the newspapers, and asked to borrow the cross. He always said yes. On the 27th of October, 1987, she wore it publicly for the only confirmed time at a Birthright Charity Gala held at Garrard itself.
She paired it with a Catherine Walker evening gown in deep purple and black baroque velvet, the dramatic ruffled collar framing her face. And instead of suspending the cross on a chain, she looped it through one of her own waist-length pearl ropes. It was an act of pure, confident styling, unexpected, slightly theatrical, and completely her own idea.
She borrowed it privately many more times, according to Sotheby’s, but no other photograph of her wearing it is known to exist. The gala image is the only one. After Diana died in August 1997, Naim put the cross away. His son Ramsey has described it sitting on the family Christmas table in the years that followed, present, visible, but not worn by anyone.
When Naim died in February 2021, Ramsey consigned it to Sotheby’s London. In January 2023, at estimate of 80,000 to 120,000 pounds, it sold for 163,800 pounds after 5-minute bidding war between five buyers. The winner was Kim Kardashian, who wore it publicly for the first time at the LACMA Art + Film Gala in Los Angeles in November 2024.
Diana never owned it, but she made it famous. The Saudi Sapphire Suite, Asprey, 1981. When Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia wanted to mark Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles in July 1981, he did not send a token gift. He commissioned a full parure from Asprey, a sapphire and diamond pendant on a diamond riviere necklace, matching pendant earrings, a ring, a sapphire bracelet, and a watch with a large oval sapphire set in a sunburst of diamonds.
The stones were chosen with purpose, large oval Burmese sapphires selected to complement the 12-carat oval Ceylon sapphire already on her engagement ring. Diana wore the suite for the first time at a National Film Institute dinner at the Royal Festival Hall in December 1981. The necklace accompanied her to Australia in 1983 and on tours throughout the decade.
The earrings became a near constant presence in her public wardrobe. What matters now is the fate of each piece. After Diana’s death, the suite passed to her sons. Around 2010, as William prepared to propose to Catherine Middleton using Diana’s sapphire engagement ring, he gave Catherine the matching sapphire and diamond pendant earrings.
She had them remounted into a drop style and first wore them at Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. She has worn them dozens of times since, always pairing them with the engagement ring. The two sapphires completing a set that Diana first received 40 years ago. The diamond riviere necklace, the bracelet, and the watch have stayed in William and Harry’s possession.
None of them have been seen in public since 1996. The modern sapphire choker, the watch from Bando. This is the most inventive thing Diana ever did with jewelry. At some point in the mid-1980s, she received a A extraordinary gift from a shika of the United Arab Emirates, a Vacheron Constantin Lady Kalla wristwatch, a one-of-a-kind creation, every surface pave set with 132 emerald cut diamonds totaling nearly 30 carats.
A watch so extraordinary it couldn’t simply stay on a wrist and tell the time. Diana didn’t wear it as a watch for long. She had a pear-shaped sapphire of unknown origin added at the center and mounted the entire diamond construction on a band of midnight blue velvet backed with Velcro to be worn as a choker.
And then, at a state banquet hosted by Emperor Hirohito at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in 1986, she wore it as a forehead band. The bandeau, once the exclusive territory of 1920s bright young things and now entirely absent from the wardrobes of working royals, suddenly reappeared on the most photographed woman in the world.
International press photographers were visibly startled. The photographs ran everywhere. By the mid-1990s, she had refashioned it again, replacing the velvet with sapphire beads and repositioning the Saudi sapphire ring at its center. This version appeared at a concert of hope at the Cardiff International Arena in 1995. It was the choker’s final known public appearance.
Since 1997, it has been in William and Harry’s possession. Like the seven-strand pearl choker, it has never been exhibited or loaned for display. The Asprey aquamarine ring, the divorce ring. Some pieces are attached to specific chapters of a life. The aquamarine ring is unmistakably a post-divorce piece. Made in 1996, the year everything was finally settled.
The stone at its heart is an emerald cut aquamarine. Valuers at Steven Stone have placed it at around 30 carats, flanked by two small diamond solitaires, set in 24 carat yellow gold. The gold was chosen deliberately to match a five-strand pearl bracelet Diana already owned. The aquamarine itself was a gift from Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador, widely described as a second mother to Diana during the worst of the separation years.
Diana had it set into a ring by Asprey. She wore it twice in public. The first time was on the 31st of October, 1996, in Sydney at a fundraising gala for the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. A bright electric blue Versace gown, the matching aquamarine clasp pearl bracelet on her wrist, the new ring very much present, very much visible.
The second time was at the private viewing for her own Christie’s dress auction in London, June 1997. Two months later, she was dead. >> >> The ring passed to Prince Harry, who gave it to Meghan Markle. She wore it on the evening of her wedding day, the 19th of May, 2018, with her Stella McCartney reception dress, driving from Windsor to Frogmore House.
She has worn it since Tonga, October 2018. The Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Gala, December 2022. Stephen Stone has valued it at around 85,000 lb. Lucia Flecha de Lima, who gave Diana the stone, died in April 2017 in Brasilia, aged 76. The Dis-Moi Oui ring by Repossi. There is no piece in the private collection that carries heavier freight than this one.
And the most honest thing to say about it is that almost nothing about it is certain. On the evening of the 30th of August, 1997, the last evening of Diana’s life, Dodi Fayed collected a ring from the Place Vendôme Paris store of Italian jeweler Alberto Repossi. It was from the Dis-Moi Oui collection. Tell me yes, a line of 1930s inspired cocktail rings.
This particular piece had an emerald-cut central diamond surrounded by four triangle-cut diamonds in a star formation. The band itself pave-set with small diamonds. Press reports at the time placed the price at around 11,600 lb, though early coverage wildly inflated this figure. The story of how the ring was obtained is contested.
Repossi himself initially claimed Diana and Dodi had visited his Monte Carlo branch 10 days before the crash and personally chosen it. The Operation Paget inquest heard a different version from Claude Roulet, assistant to the president of the Ritz. Roulet had selected two rings on Dodi’s behalf and brought them to the hotel.
Dodi chose this one. Diana, Roulet testified, never visited the shop at all. Operation Paget’s conclusion was careful. Diana was not wearing the ring when she and Dodi left the Ritz that night. The investigation could not confirm or deny that a proposal had taken place. Her friends and family told investigators she had not mentioned anything of the kind.
After the crash, the ring was found at Dodi’s apartment on Rue Arsène Houssaye. It went to his father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, who paid Repossi’s outstanding invoice and eventually displayed it as part of the innocent victims memorial inside Harrods in 2005. Al-Fayed died in August 2023. The ring’s current whereabouts are not publicly disclosed.
Repossi discontinued the entire Dis-moi Oui line after the crash and destroyed the molds. A ring that might have meant everything. Might have meant nothing. Nobody alive knows for certain. The Bulgari pieces. In the final weeks of her life, Diana received a number of gifts from Dodi Fayed. Two pieces were documented as Bulgari and both were on her body the night she died.
The first was a a yellow gold Bulgari ring set with diamonds, a band valued at around £3,000. Diana was photographed wearing it on her right ring finger on the 30th of August, 1997, the same evening she and Dodi left for the Ritz. Her butler, Paul Burrell, later stated she had called it plainly a friendship ring, not an engagement ring.
Whatever was or wasn’t planned for that evening, this piece she understood clearly. The second was a strand of seed pearls clasped at each end with diamond set gold dragon heads, a Bulgari bracelet, delicate and very fine. It was on her wrist when the Mercedes hit the pillar at the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. The crash destroyed it.
French police recovered six loose white pearls from the floor and the back seat. Both pieces, along with the gold kidney bean stud earrings she was wearing, one recovered from a hospital, the other found lodged in the dashboard six weeks later, were returned to the Spencer family. None of them have been publicly displayed or mentioned in any exhibition since.
The seven-strand pearl and sapphire choker, built around the Queen Mother’s wedding gift brooch, although the central stone was a wedding gift, this choker is a Diana piece in every meaningful sense. She designed it herself by remounting an inherited jewel. The Queen Mother gave Diana a very large oval sapphire surrounded by diamonds as a brooch in 1981.
Diana wore it as a brooch only briefly, most famously on the 1982 Dutch state visit, before having it converted into the clasp of a magnificent choker of seven graduated strands of pearls. This was the Diana power jewel. She wore it dancing with John Travolta at the Reagan White House, November 1985. Paired it with the black revenge dress by Christina Stambolian at the Serpentine Gallery on the 29th of June, 1994.
The night Prince Charles confessed his adultery on television. And wore it for her last great public fashion outing, the Met Gala in New York in December 1996. Despite being assembled around a royal family gift, it was treated as her personal property. After 1997, it passed to William and Harry.
It has not been worn publicly or exhibited since the 1996 Met Gala. There is persistent speculation that the two flanking diamonds in Meghan Markle’s three-stone engagement ring, designed by Harry in 2017 with a Botswana center stone, came from this choker. Harry has only confirmed that the side diamonds came from [snorts] my mother’s jewelry collection.
The diamond tennis bracelet. The tennis bracelet is quintessentially of its moment, a clean, modern row of brilliant cut diamonds in a single line. The kind of piece that reads as confident understatement. Diana bought it in the mid-1990s, a period when her aesthetic was deliberately stripping back.
Fewer royal loans, more personal choices, more contemporary luxury. She was wearing it at the Christie’s pre-auction party in June 1997, along with the aquamarine ring and pearl earrings. Pieces she was clearly not ready to part with, even as 79 of her gowns went under the hammer for charity. It passed to Harry.
Meghan Markle has worn it, most visibly during her and Harry’s March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, where it sat quietly on her wrist through what became one of the most watched television events of the year. Whether any diamonds from the bracelet were later used as the flanking stones in Meghan’s engagement ring, Harry has said only that the side stones came from Diana’s collection, has never been confirmed.
The Spencer Tiara. For all the interest surrounding Diana’s private jewelry, the most important point about the Spencer Tiara is what it was not. It was never hers, and it was never the crown’s. Garrard remodeled and expanded it in 1937 for Diana’s grandmother Cynthia, Lady Spencer, joining older family elements into a single cohesive design, including pieces from a tiara left to Lady Sarah Spencer in 1875, and a centerpiece gifted by Lady Sarah Spencer to Cynthia at her 1919 wedding.
The design is a flowing garland of tulips, star flowers, and scrolling foliage in diamonds set in silver on gold, centered on a heart motif. Diana borrowed it from her father, the 8th Earl Spencer, for her wedding on the 29th of July, 1981. Both her sisters had worn it for their own weddings before her.
Jane in 1978, Sarah in 1980. After Diana, her sister-in-law Victoria Lockwood wore it in 1989, and niece Celia McCorkadale in 2018. It has been a Spencer family wedding tiara for nearly 50 years, and it has always stayed in the family. On the eighth Earl’s death, it passed to his son Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer, who is its current custodian.
It will eventually pass to his son Louis, Viscount Althorp. Despite years of newspaper speculation, neither Princess Charlotte nor Princess Lilibet is in line to inherit it. It is not a royal piece, has never been a royal piece, and will remain at Althorp. It was last publicly exhibited at Sotheby’s London in 2022, in the Power and Image, Royal and Aristocratic Tiaras exhibition.
Where everything went. Diana left an estate of approximately 21 million pounds. Three quarters went to William and Harry. The remainder was divided among her 17 godchildren. A separate letter of wishes, attached to her will, asked her executors to hold her personal jewelry for her sons to give to their future wives.
That is, more or less, what happened. According to Burrell, William chose his mother’s Cartier Tank Française watch as his personal keepsake. Harry chose the Garrard sapphire and diamond engagement ring. When William decided to propose to Catherine Middleton in 2010, Harry voluntarily exchanged his ring for the watch so that Catherine could have it.
Burrell described it as Harry giving away the one thing he had kept. The result is visible. Catherine wears the sapphire engagement ring, the Saudi sapphire pendant earrings remounted as drops, and the Nigel Milne three-strand pearl bracelet, a quiet 1988 commission Diana wore constantly, most often with her Elvis Catherine Walker gown.
Catherine has worn the bracelet in Germany on diplomatic visits at formal engagements across a decade of royal life. Meghan wears the Asprey aquamarine ring, the diamond and sapphire butterfly earrings first photographed on Diana’s 1986 Canadian visit, and the diamond tennis bracelet. The two flanking diamonds in her engagement ring set beside a Botswana center stone Harry chose himself.
>> came from Diana’s collection, from which specific piece he has never publicly said. Several pieces remain in the brothers’ private possession, unworn since 1997. The seven-strand pearl and sapphire choker. The Vacheron diamond bandeau, the diamond riviere necklace from a Saudi suite. A handful of minor pieces have surfaced at auction.
A silver D pendant from Diana’s teenage years sold for around $8,000 in 2017. The Attallah cross sold to Kim Kardashian for 163,800 pounds in January 2023. And somewhere, location currently undisclosed, a Repossi ring with an emerald-cut diamond sits in a private collection. Its story still not entirely told.
oor to the royal family.
She had played with Andrew and Edward as children. The families had been intertwined for decades. What the palace got was more than a suitable bride. They got a genetic inheritance they had lost when the Hannavarians took over. The last time significant English royal blood had entered the direct line of succession was 1714.
That year the Steuarts ended and the Germans began. For nearly three centuries the British monarchy had married continental Protestants, German princes and Danish princesses and Greek royals with German ancestry. Diana broke the pattern. Her blood was Stewart, possibly TUDA, undeniably English. When she and Charles exchanged vows, two versions of royalty fused.
The legitimate Windsor line traceable through German electors and Hannavarian kings. The illegitimate Spencer line flowing from royal mistresses and hidden connections that stretch back to Henry VIII’s court. For the first time since Queen Anne died childless in 1714, the heirs to the throne would have significant English ancestry from both parents.
William and Harry weren’t just Windsor.
