On the 9th of June 2006, four years after Princess Margaret’s death, Christy’s King Street in London opened its doors for a public preview of her jewelry collection. Cues formed on the pavement outside. Inside, across the auction rooms, Margaret’s pieces were arranged in glass cases, a lifetime’s worth of objects organized by lot number, each with a pre-sale estimate printed in the catalog.
The Guardian reported it 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. Among the pieces behind the glass sat a diamond tiara, enormous Victorian. A graduated line of cushion-shaped and old cut diamond clusters alternating with scroll motifs.
The whole thing perched inside a fitted blue leather case. The estimate read 150,000 to £200,000. The Proidence Note described it as a highly important tiara. When it had last come to auction in 1959, it had sold for £5,500. Margaret had acquired it at that 1959 sale before she was engaged to anyone, before there was a wedding on the horizon, before any of the state occasions that would make the piece famous.
She wore it to her wedding in 1960. She wore it privately in a bathtub at Kensington Palace in 1962, photographed by her husband. She wore it at 11 state visits across three and a half decades, last documented on her head in 1995. Now it was in a glass case on King Street with a sticker price waiting for the auction 4 days away.
That is the story of Princess Margaret’s jewelry, and it’s more revealing than any biography her family ever authorized. The objects she chose, the ones she inherited, the ones she commissioned, and the ones that sold versus the ones that were kept, together, they formed the most honest account of her life that the palace never quite intended to release.
Margaret Rose was born on August 21st, 1930. The younger daughter of King George V 6th and Queen Elizabeth, her older sister Elizabeth, would one day inherit the throne. Margaret’s structural position within the institution was to be everything else. Beautiful, stylish, available for occasions requiring a princess, but not the monarch.
The institution had no job description for this role beyond looking the part and not embarrassing anyone. She looked the part with exceptional deliberateness. Cecil Beaton photographed her for her 19th birthday in 1949 and for her 21st at the music room of Buckingham Palace in 1951. For her 25th birthday in 1955, Beaton produced what became one of the most reproduced portraits in the Royal Archive.
Margaret wearing her Cardier Rose brooch, a sculptural diamond piece she had received as a gift when she christened a ship in Newcastle in 1952. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the print. The caption reads, “Princess Margaret wearing her Cardier Rose brooch/ Cecil Beaton 1904 to 1980/ Britain 1955. She had worn that same brooch at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
By the time Beaton photographed it on her birthday, the piece had already appeared at the defining event of her family’s decade. The jewelry wasn’t decorative in any passive sense. It was architectural, part of an image being constructed, occasion by occasion, photograph by photograph. Each beaten session selected pieces with the precision of a stage direction.
Margaret understood that a photograph isn’t a document of what was. It’s a document of what was chosen. She chose carefully. Dior noticed. An academic study of Margaret’s relationship with the house published in fashion studies documented her early adoption of the new look and recorded a question the couturier apparently put to her.
Does your highness feel like a gold person or a silver one? The question was practical. Couture runs on such decisions, but it also reveals the nature of the collaboration. Someone had to ask because Margaret’s answer was going to determine the final effect. Her preferences about color and material were specific enough to be worth establishing in advance.
She was the designer’s partner in the image, not just its subject. The five row art deco pearl and diamond necklace she wore in her birthday portraits with Beaton sold at Christy’s in 2006 for £276,800. The pre-sale estimate had been £15,000 to 20,000. That ratio, nearly 14 times the high estimate, captures what the entire auction demonstrated.
Margaret’s provenence note was worth more than the material value beneath it. But the material mattered too because it was evidence. It was the mechanism through which the image had been constructed year by year, camera to camera. Without the objects, there is no biography. There is only a title. The piece that anchors this entire story is the PTO tiara, and its history deserves to be laid out precisely.
Gerard made it in 1870 as a private commission for Florence Bamfiled, Lady Baltimore, wife of the second Baron Baltimore, and from 1872 to 1874, treasurer to Queen Victoria’s household. The design cushion-shaped and old cut diamond clusters alternating with diamond set scroll motifs mounted in silver and gold 19.
2 cm maximum diameter. convertible via a small screwdriver that came with it into a fringe necklace and 11 separate brooches. A single object that could become 12. Lady Pmore wore it to the coronation of King George V in 1911. After her death, it passed through the family until the fourth Baron Baltimore sold it at auction in 1959.
The Grandanthm Journal reported in February 1959 that a recent sale at Sabes in London included a diamond tiara sent by Lord Pultore which was bought for £5,500 by a firm of London jewelers. That firm was acting for Princess Margaret on the recommendation of Lord Plunkett. The Christy’s lot essay for the 2006 sale confirms the purchase happened before the official announcement on February 26th, 1960 of Margaret’s engagement to Anthony Armstrong Jones.
Town and Country has noted that it’s not absolutely clear whether Margaret, the Queen, or the Queen Mother ultimately paid for it. What is unambiguous is the sequence. The tiara arrived 14 months before the engagement. She wasn’t acquiring it for a wedding. She was acquiring it for herself. Margaret didn’t wait for a wedding to wear it.
She debuted the piece in May 1959 at an Iranian state visit gala. In June on a visit to Portugal, she wore it as a necklace. In July at a London gala, she wore it again. The tiara dismantled, reconfigured, worn differently from what the piece was built to be. Gerard has noted that Princess Margaret wore the PTO tiara throughout her life in its original form and also as a necklace and brooches.
The convertible design demonstrating the ingenuity of craftseople who could build a piece that functions across so many configurations and yet converges seamlessly as a magnificent tiara. The world saw the pole as a tiara for the first time on the 6th of May 1960 at Westminster Abbey when Margaret married Anthony Armstrong Jones.
It was the first royal wedding to be broadcast on television with an estimated 300 million viewers watching worldwide. She arrived by horsedrawn carriage wearing a silk oranza gown by Sir Norman Hartnull. The court couturier who had made the queen’s wedding dress 13 years earlier. The PTO tiara was perched on her dark hair, anchoring a cathedral length veil, adding several inches to her 5’1 frame.
She wore no earrings, just the tiara and the antique diamond rivier necklace inherited from Queen Mary, documented in three handwritten notes as the Lady Mount Steven, which would sell at Christy’s 2006 for 993,600 against an estimate of £200,000 to £300,000. After the wedding, the wearing record runs across three subsequent decades.
Japan in 1971, Sweden in 1975, Oman in 1982, Spain in 1986, Poland in 1991, Brunai in 1992, last documented at state level in 1995. 35 years of continuous formal use. A piece she had selected at auction, worn to her own wedding, and then worked through the full machinery of royal duty for another three and a half decades after that.
This is a different category of relationship to an object than most people manage with anything they own. The inherited pieces in the collection tell a separate story of what it meant to be the younger daughter of the royal house in Queen Mary’s era. Queen Mary accumulated jewels with the dedication of a curator and distributed them to her family with equivalent purposefulness.
The Persian turquoise triumph of love tiara, the only turquoise diadem in the royal collection came to Margaret from Queen Mary through the queen mother. Margaret received it on her 21st birthday and wore it regularly at formal events. The pieces that arrived through dynasty sat in the collection alongside the things she had chosen for herself.
That distinction between the two categories became legally significant after her death. King George V 6th purchased a Cardier jardinetto brooch for his younger daughter on September 9th, 1938. The design carved citrine, almondine, garnet, paridot, and pink tormylene flowers set in diamond and enamel.
A jardonetto meaning little garden, a confection for a child. Margaret was 8 years old. She kept it for over six decades. At Christiey’s 2006, it sold for £38,400 against an estimate of £3,000 to £4,000. The buyer paid roughly 12 times the material estimate, and they understood exactly what they were purchasing.
George V 6th, his daughter, September 1938, 3 years before Margaret’s father would broadcast his wartime addresses to the nation. The engagement ring, when it arrived in 1959, broke with precedent in ways that made a clear statement about what kind of marriage this was going to be. Anthony Armstrong Jones designed it himself.
A ruby center stone surrounded by diamonds arranged to form a rose bud. The shape almost certainly referencing Margaret’s middle name, Rose. He had it made by SJ Phillips, an English jeweler, not Gerard, not Cardier. The two houses that had made royal engagement rings as a matter of routine. This was a complete departure from that tradition, and it was deliberate.
Armstrong Jones was a society photographer, brilliant, visually acute, and socially fluid in ways that made him both appealing and genuinely difficult to fold into the House of Windsor. Margaret was the first daughter of a British king to marry a commoner in the modern era. The ring matched the decision. Neither of them was following the established template.
Where other royal husbands might commission a piece from the crown jeweler and hand it over, Armstrong Jones made the object himself in a conceptual sense. The ruby and its rose bud setting were his design. The ring was intimate in a way that institutional jewelry couldn’t quite be. It said something about who these two people wanted to be together.
at least in 1959 when it was made and the future looked different from how it would eventually arrive. The marriage in functional terms ran from 1960 to the separation in 1976 and the divorce was finalized in 1978. During those 18 years, the collection evolved into something more complex than the pre-marriage acquisitions.
Armstrong Jones designed multiple pieces himself. Three specific items were attributed to his design in the 2006 auction records. A golden diamond flower brooch, a ruby and diamond cluster ring, and gold turquoise and diamond earrings. He also created the Snowden floral tiara assembled from diamond brooes he had crafted which he gave to their daughter Lady Sarah as a wedding gift in 1994.
His creative fingerprint on the collection was substantial and traceable. The Griema Commission arrived in 1967 and represents something different again. Margaret operating within an aesthetic circle that her husband had partly convened, selecting a piece that no one in any palace administrator’s office would have thought to acquire on her behalf.
Andrew Griema was born in Rome in 1921, moved to England at 5, and became through work that Sues described as making him a revolutionary of 1960s British jewelry, the preeeminent avantgard jeweler of the post-war period. His pieces were wearable sculptures, textured molten gold, unpolished and uncut stones, forms cast directly from organic materials.
Philip’s auction records describe his method plainly. The organic effect was often achieved by casting from nature, leaves, twigs, even pencil shavings. He won the Duke of Edinburgh’s Prize for Elegant Design, the first and only jewelry ever to do so. Town and Country recorded how the Griema connection began with Snowden reportedly commenting that nothing exciting was happening in British jewelry design and Griema respectfully disagreeing, inviting him to his German street shop. It paid off.
Princess Margaret can be seen wearing a Griema brooch in a family portrait from 1965. And by 1966, the Queen had acquired Griema pieces as well. Griema opened his German street shop in October 1966 with Armstrong Jones as guest of honor at the launch. Academic records describe Griema as part of the Snowden set.
He was a social fact of that marriage, not simply a jeweler. In 1967, Princess Margaret commissioned a brooch from Griema made from lyken she had collected at Balmoral. She sent the lyken to him as a physical prototype. He cast it in yellow gold and set it with diamonds, a fragment of Scottish Morland, transmuted by one of the most innovative jewelers of the century into something a princess could wear to a state occasion.
That brooch sold at Christy’s 2006 for £12,000. The Christy’s press release specifically cited it as evidence of her acute eye and sense of style for unique and technically virtuous creations. Two words, acute eye, buried in a press release, and they are probably the most accurate characterization of Margaret’s relationship to objects that any official document ever produced.
She was watching. She was choosing. She was building something. The bathtub photograph belongs to 1962. Armstrong Jones photographed his wife at Kensington Palace sitting in a bath wearing nothing except the PTO tiara on top of a sky high beehive. The image was titled Dip in Diamonds. He kept it private for 44 years, releasing it in 2006, the same year as the Christy’s auction, as part of a London gallery show.
In 2022, it appeared at Kensington Palace’s exhibition, Life Through a Royal Lens. After Armstrong Jones’s death in 2017, the royal family quietly removed it from public view. The photograph isn’t a formal portrait. It’s a private image between two people who were in 1962 still finding each other amusing, irreverent, absurd, and genuinely magnificent simultaneously.
Margaret smiling in a bathtub, tiara perched perfectly, the whole thing ridiculous and gorgeous at once. Everyone who has looked at it understands why he took it and why she led him. It’s the most honest image ever made of her and it was hidden for four decades. By the early 1970s, the marriage was audibly crumbling.
In 1976, photographs of Margaret on holiday in Mystique with Rody Llewellyn, a landscape gardener, 17 years her junior, appeared in the News of the World. Lord Snowden notified her press secretary the marriage was over. The separation and divorce that followed, finalized in 1978, were the first in the British royal family for 400 years.
In 1979, the year after the divorce, Margaret sold seven pieces of jewelry at Sabes. The specific pieces aren’t fully documented in the public record. What is documented is the fact she was liquidating parts of the collection. The civil list allowance that had supported her public role had started at £6,000 per year in 1952, had risen incrementally, but had never been structured to sustain the kind of life she had built.
Kensington Palace, Mystique, the social scale of a working princess who was no longer quite in the foreground of the institution’s public program. The 1979 sales established something important. The collection wasn’t a sealed archive. It moved. She bought, wore, and when necessary sold. But the Pmore she kept through all of it.
Through the separation, the divorce, the tabloid years, the declining health. She wore it to state visits until 1995. 3 years before the first stroke, it was still on her head. Margaret suffered a series of strokes from 1998. She had been a heavy smoker throughout her adult life. Her health deteriorated through the last four years.
She died on the 9th of February, 2002 at the King Edward IIIth Hospital in London at 6:30 in the morning following a stroke she had suffered the previous afternoon. The announcement from Buckingham Palace read, “Her beloved sister, Princess Margaret, died peacefully in her sleep this morning at 6:30 a.m. in the King Edward IIIth Hospital. She was 71.
The Queen Mother died 6 weeks later in March. The estate, when it was probated, stood at approximately 7.6 million. Prior to her death, Margaret had already transferred approximately 12 million pounds in assets to family members. The inheritance tax bill on the remaining estate reportedly exceeded £3 million.
David Armstrong Jones, then Viccount Linley, furniture designer and businessman, and now the second Earl of Snowden, and his sister, Lady Sarah Cado, were the beneficiaries, and the decisions about the collection fell to them. The four-year gap between Margaret’s death in February 2002 and the auction in June 2006 reflects the mechanics of a large estate.
The probate process, the tax negotiations, the decisions about what to keep and what to sell, the conversations with Christies about cataloging and sequencing a collection of approximately 800 objects. Her children also faced a practical challenge their grandmother, the Queen Mother, didn’t. The Queen Mother’s estate, which substantially exceeded Margaret’s in value, was handled very differently.
Much of the Queen Mother’s jewelry was categorized as crown heirlooms, items that had been in the family’s collection long enough and formally enough to return to the royal collection rather than passing through a commercial auction house. Margaret’s collection didn’t sit in that category. Her pieces were personal property acquired privately, inherited from a grandmother, gifted by a father, commissioned from a society jeweler, purchased at auction before an engagement was announced.
They were hers in a way the institution’s jewels could never be. That made them sailable in a way the institution’s jewels weren’t. But before the auction could proceed as planned, Queen Elizabeth II intervened. The Queen was concerned about a repeat of the 2003 faucet scandal in which a royal aid had sold official gifts for private gain, generating significant public embarrassment.
Her intervention was specific. Margaret’s children were asked to distinguish between items received in an official capacity, state gifts, pieces given in connection with royal duties, and items that were genuinely personal. Proceeds from the official category items were to go to charity.
The arrangement complicated the sales preparation and was itself a signal that the auction was navigating territory the family found uncomfortable. Lord Snowden found it considerably more than uncomfortable. According to multiple reports, he wrote to his children asking them to stop the auction entirely. Tatler confirmed he was reportedly crushed, that his children sold his former wife’s wedding tiara.
He had reportedly also written to Christies itself to protest the inclusion of certain personal items. His objection was overruled. The sale proceeded on his children’s terms with the Queen’s adjustments on the official gifts question incorporated. Snowden’s letter asking them to stop is, in its own way, as revealing as anything the auction produced.
He was a visual artist, someone who understood objects as bearers of meaning. He understood what it would mean when the Baltimore tiara, the piece that had been on her head at their wedding, on her head in the bathtub photograph he had taken 44 years earlier, was described in a lot essay, given a pre-sale estimate, and sold to the room.
Christiey’s auction number 7,335 opened at Christy’s King Street, London on the 13th of June, 2006. The catalog jewelry and fabraier from the collection of HR, the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden. Day two on the 14th of June covered silver, furniture, and works of art.
The two sessions together ran to approximately 800 lots. Every single one sold. The sell-through rate was 100%. The auction rooms were packed. More than 1,000 clients had submitted written bids before the opening gavel. More than 500 joined by telephone from around the world. Buyer activity on day one was 58% UK, 16% Americas, 15% from the rest of Europe, and 10% from Asia.
Christiey’s chairman of Europe, Francois Curiel, who also served as the auctioneer, said afterwards, “Her glamour and aura were such that collectors flew especially from Asia and America for just one day to participate in this landmark auction.” Pieces fetched results up to 150 times their original estimates, which is unprecedented.
As the market decided the added value of the royal providence, lot one established the logic immediately. A ruby and cultured pearl necklace dated circa 1930 worn in a photograph of Margaret when she was just 2 years old. Estimate 1,200 to 1,500. Realized 27,600. The room had understood the rules within the first 30 seconds of the first day.
The major realized prices came in rapid succession through day one. The Faber clock from Queen Mary, a translucent mauve enameled silver clock applied with gold decorative elements, sold for 1,240,000, the second highest price ever paid at auction for any Faber clock. The Lady Mount Steven antique Diamond Rivier Necklace.
The piece Margaret had worn at her wedding, accompanied by three of Queen Mary’s handwritten notes identifying the previous owner, 993,600 against a £200,000 to £300,000 estimate. The five row art deco pearl and diamond necklace from the beaten birthday portraits 276,800 against £15,000 to 20,000. The Victorian be brooch accompanied by Margaret’s handwritten note reading almost the first bit of jewelry given to mom given to me 10th February 1945.
33,600 against a£500 to700 estimate. The Lykan brooch cast by Andrew Griema from the piece of Balmoral Morland she had collected and sent to him £12,000. Cartier Giardinetto brooch George V 6th’s gift of September 1938 38,400 against £3,000 to £4,000. Then lot 192 theore tiara pre-sale estimate 150,000 to £200,000.
The lot essay described it as a graduated line of cushion-shaped and old cut diamond clusters alternating with diamond set scroll motifs each surmounted by old cut diamond terminals to the collet set diamond line mounted in silver and gold circa 1870 19.2 cm maximum diameter convertible to a necklace and 11 brooches with screwdriver and brooch fittings in fitted blue leather case.
It cited the provenence made by Gerard in 1870 for Lady Pulaltimore. Sold at auction on 29th January 1959 for 5,500 purchased on the recommendation of Lord Plunkett. It noted that the princess had worn the piece in its necklace form on several occasions before her marriage and that she had first worn it as a tiara on her wedding day, arriving at Westminster Abbey by horsedrawn carriage. Several bidders competed.
The hammer came down at 926,400. That is 4 and a half times the high pre-sale estimate. Gerard’s assessment of what the piece was worth materially expressed in that estimate had been accurate. What the room added to the material value was the 47-year biography it carried. The Iranian state visit in 1959.
The gala at Covent Garden, the wedding, the bathtub, the state visits across five continents. The life of a woman who had bought it herself, worn it her way, and refused to give it back to the vault she’d taken it from. The buyer was anonymous. Multiple reports identified them as a private Asian purchaser.
The tiara hasn’t been seen publicly since the sale. It went into a private collection somewhere and stopped being visible, which is a kind of justice the piece might not have anticipated. The institution it spent 47 years orbiting couldn’t hold it. The market took it out of circulation as efficiently as it had priced it.
Day 2’s sale added a further 4,52,48. The two-day total 13,658,728. The pre-sale estimate for the entire collection had reportedly been approximately £3 million. The realized total was approximately 10 million above that figure. What wasn’t in the sale matters as much as what was.
Lady Sarah Cado, born Lady Sarah Francis Elizabeth Armstrong Jones in 1964, the only daughter of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden, now a professional artist and non-working member of the royal family, inherited by multiple accounts the bulk of her mother’s jewelry collection. The pieces she kept are traceable through her public appearances over the two decades since the auction, and they form their own catalog, not of what Margaret was worth to the market, but of what she was worth to the person who loved her most directly. The Snowden floral tiara, never auctioned, created by Anthony Armstrong Jones from diamond brooches he had made himself, assembled into a tiara and given to Lady Sarah as a wedding gift at her 1994 marriage to artist Daniel Cado. Sarah wore it at her wedding. Wore it
again at the Queen and Duke of Edinburghough’s golden wedding anniversary celebration in 1997. Ward at Princess Margaret’s funeral in 2002. And wor it at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. Four of the most significant events of her adult life. The same piece every time. The diamond starburst earrings confirmed by Tatler.
At a Queen Elizabeth II centenery event at the British Museum, Lady Sarah appeared in a pink and orange outfit wearing what Tatler identified as a favorite pair of diamond starburst earrings that previously belonged to her mother, Princess Margaret. The magazine noted that Princess Margaret had first worn the earrings with the Cardier Halo tiara on a royal tour of the Caribbean in 1955.
Tatler described the earrings as a sentimental touch. Sarah has worn them to multiple royal occasions since the sapphire centered brooch with diamonds. At the Easter Sunday church service at Windsor in 2025, Lady Sarah wore her mother’s diamond brooch, confirmed by Hello Magazine as an heirloom inherited from Princess Margaret.
She had first worn the matching brooch months after Margaret’s death at an event celebrating the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002. In the intervening years, she has worn it at funerals, parties, weddings, and Christmas day church services with the royal family. The pearl and diamond earrings, worn at her own 1994 wedding. People magazine confirmed them as inherited from mom, Princess Margaret, and worn again at Royal Ascot in subsequent years.
Each public wearing is a small act of biography, an insistence that the person who owned these things first is still part of the story. One of the two diamond Rivier necklaces from the collection, Princess Margaret, had owned two remarkably similar versions also remained with Lady Sarah. The antique Rivier from Queen Mary’s 1937 coronation.
The Lady Mount Steven piece with its three handwritten provenence notes sold at Christy’s 2006 for 993,600. The second Rivier, whose origin is less clearly documented, was retained. The family kept one, the market got the other. The ruby and diamond engagement ring. Armstrong Jones’s rose bud design made by SJ Phillips wasn’t in the 2006 sale either.
It passed to David Armstrong Jones in 2023. He gave it to his daughter, Lady Margarita Armstrong Jones for her 21st birthday. She wore it to the coronation of King Charles III in May 2023. A piece designed in 1959 by a society photographer who was courting a princess in secret. Acquired at the beginning of the most talked about marriage the family had seen in a generation.
Absent from the auction that dispersed the rest of the collection and then worn to the next coronation. The ring completed a different ark. Not through the auction room but through the family’s hands one generation at a time. arriving at a public occasion 64 years after it was made.
The second Earl of Snowden was reportedly quoted as saying that the family kept the best of the jewels. That framing is instructive. The auction wasn’t a dispersal of everything. It was a selection. The pieces that went under the hammer were chosen. The pieces that remained were also chosen. Both sets of choices were deliberate and together they constitute a kind of sorting by what had market value, yes, but also by what had another kind of value that the market couldn’t adequately price.
The contrast with how royal estates are typically managed isn’t incidental to the story. It’s the story’s structural argument. When the Queen Mother died 6 weeks after Margaret in the spring of 2002, her estate, reportedly valued at significantly more than 70 million pounds, was handled without a public auction of her personal jewelry.
The Queen Mother’s pieces were substantially categorized as heirlooms with long dynastic standing, pieces that had been crown adjacent long enough to be absorbed back into royal holdings without passing through the commercial market. The institution protected its own history by keeping its objects out of lot cataloges.
Margaret’s collection was personal property in a sense that the Queen Mothers wasn’t because Margaret had spent her life personalizing it. Buying her own tiara before an engagement, commissioning a brooch from Lyken she’d collected herself, choosing a ring designer from her husband’s social set rather than the crown jeweler.
The personal choices that made her collection distinctive were precisely what left it exposed to the auction house. This is the thing that palace biographies have tended to soften. Margaret is usually framed as a tragic figure. The one who wanted to marry a divorced man and was told she couldn’t. The one whose marriage then failed.
The one who lived in a diminished space between public duty and private dissolution. That framing isn’t false, but it leaves out something the objects prove. She was also a woman who made choices deliberately and with a clear aesthetic intelligence about who she was going to be and what was going to represent her.
Theore tiara is the proof object because she acquired it herself, wore it at her own discretion, and its sale after her death exposed what those choices had always meant, that they were hers, not the institutions. And when the institution could no longer protect them from market forces, the market told the truth. The auction wasn’t a scandal.
The family framed it accurately as a financial necessity. The inheritance tax bill required liquidity. Lord Snowden’s objection was sincere, but it was also overruled. The Queen’s intervention about official gifts was navigated. Christies prepared the catalog, and the sale ran to its 13.6 6 million conclusion with complete sell through which is the auction house’s version of a standing ovation.
None of this was accidental or chaotic. It was managed. It was professional. And it was by some measure the most transparent thing that ever happened to Margaret’s legacy. More transparent than the authorized biography. More transparent than the official photograph. more transparent than any statement the palace ever released about who she was or what she had meant because the auction catalog does something palace communications can’t do. It lists the objects.
It gives them lot numbers and estimates and realized prices. It notes that a ruby and cultured pearl necklace was photographed on Margaret at 2 years old and sold for 23 times its high estimate. It notes that a handwritten note accompanying a BB brooch drove the price to 60 times the high estimate. It records that a piece of Lyken from Balmoral sent to a jeweler as a prototype sold for £12,000.
The catalog does not editorialize. It does not explain what any of this means. It simply lists what was there and what it fetched and leaves the interpretation to anyone willing to read it carefully. A former Christy’s jewelry specialist, Helen Molsworth, subsequently wrote a book about the behindthe-scenes story of the sale.
That book exists because what happened in those two days at King Street in June 2006 was remarkable enough to require a secondary account. The auction itself was the primary document. 800 lots, 100% sold, 13.6 million pounds realized. A Baltimore tiara gone to an anonymous buyer in Asia at 4 and a half times the estimate. Since the auction, the tiara hasn’t appeared publicly.
It’s by all available accounts in a private vault somewhere. The piece Margaret bought herself. War to her own wedding. War in a bathtub photograph. War at state occasions to 11 countries over 35 years. It’s now invisible. The institution it spent 47 years orbiting couldn’t hold it. The market got it and took it out of the story.
What remains visible are the pieces Lady Sarah chose to keep. The snowed in floral tiara at the Queen’s funeral. The diamond starburst earrings at the British Museum. The sapphire brooch at Windsor at Easter. Smaller objects than the pole. Quieter objects. But there in the light, where the tiara no longer is. In May 2023, Lady Margarita Armstrong Jones attended the coronation of King Charles III wearing the ruby and diamond rose bud ring that her grandfather Armstrong Jones had designed in 1959 for a woman he was secretly in love with. 64 years between the ring’s creation and its appearance on a grandchild’s hand at a coronation. The engagement was gone. The marriage was gone. The woman who wore it first was gone. The man who made it was gone. The
ring was still there. That is the thing about objects. They survive the people who make them meaningful. And in surviving, they ask questions the people would have preferred to leave unanswered. Margaret’s collection asked every question she spent her life managing, about independence and institution, about self-invention and duty, about what a woman keeps for herself inside a role that belongs to everybody else.
The auction was the public filing of those questions, one lot at a time, each with a price. Margaret’s jewels survived her image, but they didn’t protect it. If you want more stories like this, royal history, the objects that outlast the people who own them, the auctions that say what the authorized accounts won’t, subscribe.
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