Christie’s in London, King Street, June 9th, 2006. In the viewing rooms ahead of one of the most significant royal estate sales of the decade, a specialist named Helen Molesworth lifts a diamond tiara for the preview cameras. Both hands. The piece needs them. 6 in at its highest point, the frame threaded with brown velvet ribbon so that the diamonds appear to float rather than sit.
Diamond clusters in silver and gold, scroll motifs recalling Victorian flowers. The design simultaneously grand and weightless. The catalog placarded on the display stand reads, “£150,000 to £200,000.” That estimate, in 4 days, will prove to be one of the more spectacular miscalculations in the history of royal provenance.
The woman this tiara belonged to died 4 years ago, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II. The most photographed, most written about, most spectacularly difficult royal of her generation bought this piece at auction in January 1959 for £5,500. She wore it to her own wedding.
She wore it in the most intimate private photograph her husband ever took of her. Across three decades of state occasions and gala evenings and royal portraits, this tiara was on her head. And now, it has a lot number. The woman who authorized its sale is Margaret’s daughter. Lady Sarah Chatto is 42.
She lives in London with her husband Daniel, who is also a painter. She shows her own paintings at the Redfern Gallery in Mayfair under the name Sarah Armstrong-Jones, her father’s name, not her married name, not her title. And she is described consistently and across years of royal coverage as someone whose appearances at family events are rare.
She does not undertake official royal duties. She does not give interviews. If you followed Princess Margaret’s story, the biographies, the staff accounts of what it was actually like to work for her, the decades of press coverage that documented her glamour and her difficulty in approximately equal measure, you know the outline of her public life. This isn’t that story.
This is the one that starts here, in Christie’s viewing rooms, 4 years after the death, and asks, “What remains when a performing life is finished? What was sold? What was kept? And what the choices of a daughter who chose silence over spectacle say about what it means to inherit a life as loud as her mother’s?” Princess Margaret made noise.
Her daughter inherited the pieces left behind and chose silence. To understand what the auction meant, what was lost, what was transformed, what was permanently finalized, you have to understand what the objects meant to Margaret before Christie’s ever cataloged them. The writer Hamish Bowles, reviewing Craig Brown’s biography of Princess Margaret in Vogue, reached for specifics to explain his childhood fascination with her.
He had grown up captivated, he wrote, by Princess Margaret’s hairbell blue eyes, her Minnie Mouse white shoes that fractionally elevated her diminutive form, and her mallard raw silk drawing room. The drawing room’s color had been revealed in a Sunday supplement profile. He remembered it decades later.
That is what Margaret did with a room, with a color, with a pair of shoes, with the specific frequency of her blue eyes against the specific hue of her upholstery. She made her environments so precisely themselves that they remained in people’s minds long after the visit ended. She stood 5 ft 1 in.
She smoked through a long cigarette holder. She had preferences so exacting and so sustained across her adult life that they amounted to a philosophical position about identity. You knew who she was by what she wore, by what she surrounded herself with, by the specific gleam and weight of what she chose to carry into a room.
The Poltimore tiara was the fullest expression of that philosophy. Garrard, the royal jeweler, created it in 1870 as a private commission for Florence Bampfylde, Lady Poltimore, whose husband served as treasurer to Queen Victoria’s household from 1872 to 1874. The tiara passed through the family, and the third Baroness Poltimore wore it at King George V’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1911.
The piece’s first documented entry into a major state occasion. It passed through the Poltimore family for 90 years until the fourth Baron Poltimore put it up for auction in January 1959. Margaret was 28. She wasn’t yet officially engaged. The announcement of her engagement to Antony Armstrong-Jones, the society photographer, wouldn’t come until February 26th, 1960, more than a year later.
But Lord Plunket, her deputy master of the household, recommended the piece, and she purchased it for £5,500 at auction. That transaction was premeditated. She chose her wedding crown before the engagement was public, 16 months before she walked down the aisle at Westminster Abbey. The obvious move, the royal convention, was to borrow from the Crown Collection.
Her sister had done it. Future royal brides would do it for decades. Margaret had access, by virtue of her position, to some of the finest pieces in the world at no cost. She bought her own crown instead. Sarah Prentice of Garrard reflected on this choice for only natural diamonds. Women purchase pieces for themselves far more often now, but in 1959, that was still exceptional.
Margaret chose the tiara herself, and the impulse behind that choice speaks to how much she must have loved it. The tiara’s design allowed it multiple configurations. Worn in its full height, it was a statement piece of considerable grandeur, diamond clusters and scroll work rising nearly 6 in, the velvet ribbon at its base threading through dark hair so the diamonds appeared to float above the wearer’s head.
Reduced to its necklace form by separating and rearranging its elements, it became a diamond fringe necklace. Further disassembled, it yielded 11 individual brooches. Margaret wore it as a necklace at a gala ballet performance at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in 1960, months before her wedding.
Again, at a film premiere in Charing Cross that October, the world saw its full form on May 6th, 1960, when she arrived at Westminster Abbey by horse-drawn carriage in a Norman Hartnell gown. The velvet ribbon invisible against her dark upswept hair, the diamonds practically hovering above. It was the first royal wedding broadcast on television.
300 million viewers watched. 2 years later, at Kensington Palace in 1962, Antony Armstrong-Jones photographed his wife in a bathtub. She wore the Poltimore tiara. Her hair was in a high beehive. She was grinning slightly sideways at the camera. The grin of someone who understands exactly how absurd the image is and finds that absurdity entirely the point.
He kept the photograph private for 44 years until 2006. It was released the same year as the auction, and Vogue described it with a directness that confirmed its iconic status. You know the picture, Princess Margaret lying in a bathtub wearing nothing but a tiara perched upon her head.
The photograph was later exhibited in the Life Through a Royal Lens show at Kensington Palace in 2022. In that bathtub image, Margaret is performing even in private for an audience of one. The humor and the grandeur held simultaneously. The tiara was, at that moment, not a piece of jewelry being worn to a state occasion.
It was the entire argument about who she was, distilled into a single private photograph. For three decades after the wedding, the Poltimore tiara appeared with her at state banquets, state openings of Parliament, the Shah of Iran’s state visit in 1977, royal portraits, and gala evenings. It was the piece she came back to across the full arc of her public life.
The rest of the collection tracked similar trajectories. King George VI gave his younger daughter an engraved gold cigarette case by Cartier for Christmas, 1949. The year is specific here. The King’s health would begin its visible deterioration in 1951. He died in February 1952. The cigarette case he gave Margaret for Christmas 1949, the penultimate year before the trajectory clearly turned, was a specific, intimate, precisely chosen present from a father who would be dead within 3 years.
It sat with her for more than 50 years. Through the 1960s, she wore a Cartier ruby flower brooch to gala performances and premieres. Five gold petals unfurling, the rubies darkly vivid in photographs. The piece appearing again and again in the coverage of whatever event she attended. Queen Mary, her grandmother, left her a Fabergé mauve enameled silver clock and a diamond riviere necklace.
Cecil Beaton photographed her wearing a five-row Art Deco pearl and diamond necklace. That necklace will later appear in the Christie’s catalog. The Beaton photographs remain. Margaret in formal pose, the pearls against her throat. The photographer who helped define the visual grammar of 1950s royal glamour, capturing one of its most sustained subjects.
These weren’t possessions in the ordinary sense. They were biographical artifacts. Each piece marked a relationship, a moment, a sustained aspect of who she had decided to be. By the end of her life, Craig Brown observed the arc of her decades, from glamorous style icon to a rather lonely figure in ill health and semi-paralyzed, living out her days at Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret.
The glamour had not been separate from the objects. The objects were part of how the glamour worked. When the mechanism contracted, when the gala evenings stopped, when the state banquets ended, when the body failed, the objects remained as proof that the glamour had been genuine. She burned her private correspondence before she died.
The letters were gone. The pieces remained. Four years after her death, her children consigned them to Christie’s. Princess Margaret died on February 9th, 2002. She was 71 years old. Her personal estate was valued at 7.6 million pounds and it was immediately subject to inheritance tax. The sovereign’s possessions pass free of inheritance tax.
Margaret’s personal collection didn’t qualify for that exemption. Non-sovereign royals pay at the standard rate, 40%. On a 7.6 million-pound estate, that amounts to approximately 3 million pounds owed. Her son David, then Viscount Linley, and her daughter, Lady Sarah Chatto, then 38, inherited both the collection and the obligation.
David would later explain the situation to the Daily Telegraph in 2019. There were many, many reasons, mostly financial, that persuaded us that that was the correct route because, you know, when people die, taxes need to be paid. Four years after her death, the collection went to Christie’s. Christie’s gave the preview of formal name, jewelry and Fabergé from the collection of HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon.
The preview opened on June 9th, 2006. In its notes for the press, Christie’s stated that no items have been withdrawn from sale and there is no dispute about the title of the property. That statement would be quietly revised before the auction opened. The sale ran across two consecutive days, June 13th, 2006, jewelry and Fabergé.
June 14th, silver, furniture, and works of art. Christie’s had estimated the total collection at approximately 5 million pounds. The jewelry alone would exceed that estimate within hours of day one opening. The bidding rooms filled. Queues had formed outside to view the preview. International buyers competed.
Day one’s catalog listed 192 lots. Contemporary accounts describe the atmosphere as one of fierce bidding and unprecedented international interest. Provenance does something specific to the value of an object at auction. A ceramic clock that belonged to someone famous is worth more than the same clock that belonged to nobody in particular.
Margaret had spent six decades making herself famous, photographed and recognizable. The auction converted that accumulated fame into hammer prices. The Fabergé mauve enameled silver clock, Queen Mary’s gift to her granddaughter, an object that had sat in the family across two royal generations, went first among the top lots.
It realized 2,281,600 $. The second highest price ever achieved at auction for a Fabergé clock. The Lady Mountbatten diamond riviere, also from Queen Mary and accompanied by handwritten notes in Queen Mary’s own hand detailing the piece’s provenance, sold for 1,828,224 $.
Pietro Annigoni’s 1957 portrait of Princess Margaret at 27, formal, luminous, a woman at the height of her glamour captured by one of the most celebrated portrait artists of the 20th century, brought 1,249,570 $. A world auction record for Annigoni. The record price went to a private collector whose name was never announced. The five-row Art Deco pearl and diamond necklace from the Cecil Beaton photographs sold for 509,312 $.
The photograph that gave the necklace its specific gravity, Margaret in Beaton’s formal pose, the image that had appeared in magazines and exhibition catalogs across decades, didn’t come with the lot. The provenance note would have to carry the history forward. The Poltimore tiara, estimated at 150,000 pounds to 200,000 pounds, drew multiple competing bidders.
Several serious buyers wanted it. The gavel came down at 926,400 pounds, nearly five times the high estimate. The buyer’s identity wasn’t disclosed. No name emerged in subsequent press coverage. The tiara hasn’t been photographed in public since. King George VI’s Cartier cigarette case, the Christmas 1949 gift, the father’s intimate present to his younger daughter in the penultimate year before his health visibly turned, sold for 187,476 $.
The lot description would have carried the provenance, “Given to Princess Margaret by His Majesty King George VI for Christmas 1949.” 50 years of private meaning, cataloged, assigned a market value, dispersed to a buyer whose name we don’t know. Day one closed at 9,598,160 pounds.
Day two added 4,052,408 pounds. The combined two-day total was 13,658,728 pounds, approximately 25 million dollars at the time. Christie’s had estimated 5 million pounds. The sale raised nearly three times that. Margaret had spent her life manufacturing the glamour that made the collection commercially significant. The auction efficiently converted that glamour into British pounds.
Two lots, however, were withdrawn before the gavel opened. The first was a 1930s cast iron balustrade purchased from Ascot Racecourse and installed in the Rose Garden at Kensington Palace. Estimated at 15,000 pounds, it was pulled without public explanation. The second withdrawal was more charged. A Lalique crucifix and its wooden stand from the Queen Mother’s collection.
The crucifix was accompanied by a handwritten note in the Queen Mother’s own handwriting. “This crucifix by Lalique was given to me in my early days of marriage by Princess Beatrice, youngest daughter of Queen Victoria.” Both the object and the note, the note connecting the Queen Mother’s early marriage to Princess Beatrice’s generosity, placing the Lalique piece inside a Victorian family transmission stretching back to Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, were withdrawn before bidding opened.
Press reports suggested Queen Elizabeth II had intervened to have it removed. The same Queen had separately directed that 47 lots be designated for the Stroke Association rather than the estate on the basis that they had been received by Margaret in an official royal capacity rather than as personal gifts.
Antony Armstrong Jones, Lord Snowdon, Margaret’s ex-husband since 1978, had opposed the sale in writing. He sent a letter to his children asking them to stop it. Marie Claire reported the emotional damage plainly. David and Sarah had broken their father, Lord Snowdon’s heart. The sale went ahead regardless.
The Daily Telegraph’s headline for day one read, “Bidding frenzy as Margaret’s treasures are sold for 9 million pounds.” The Guardian ran, “Not quite the crown jewels.” Biographer Kenneth Rose commented critically, questioning the emotional impact on those who had given official gifts to the princess over the decades.
Christie’s released a statement describing a wonderful tribute to a beautiful and stylish princess. The auction transformed the private inventory of a royal life, decades of family gifts, personal purchases, accrued sentiment, into cataloged lots with reserve prices. Every item tagged with her name carried its provenance forward as a selling point.
She had made herself famous enough, glamorous enough, and photographed enough that her name added value to a Fabergé clock, a pearl necklace, an intimate cigarette case, and a tiara. The auction was the final proof of that project’s success and its complete dissolution at the same time. Lady Sarah Chatto kept certain pieces. Specifying which ones requires precision because the line between confirmed retention and attributed by proximity shifts quickly in royal jewelry coverage. And the difference matters.
The Snowden floral tiara was never available for the Christie’s catalog. It had already crossed between hands 12 years before the auction. Antony Armstrong-Jones gave it to Princess Margaret on their wedding day.
