Queen Mary’s Love Trophy Collar

Next week marks the 70th Anniversary of the Death of Queen Mary! The Teck Princess who lived through the reigns of six monarchs and was the Queen Consort for 25 years, as well as a Queen Mother and Queen Grandmother, Queen Mary assembled much of the British Royal Family’s spectacular Jewellery Collection, so we are featuring some of the jewels in the days leading up to the anniversary, continuing with Queen Mary’s Love Trophy Collar!

In 1901, the new Princess of Wales commissioned a spectacular ‘Love Trophy Collar’ from either Garrard & Co. or Cartier, using stones from a pair of diamond star earrings she received from her mother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, the Duchess of Teck, in 1884, a set of seven 12-pointed stars from her grandmother, the Duchess of Cambridge, and a diamond spray brooch from her aunt, Princess Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The Love Trophy Collar was described as:

being formed of seven brilliant-set panels, each with an amatory of bow, quiver and torch in a laurel-wreath oval suspended from a ribbon tie, framed by foliate brilliant-set bands”

The Princess of Wales soon began to wear her spectacular Love Trophy Collar, which appeared in several spectacular portraits in the early 1900s, worn with her Iveagh Tiara, her Amethyst Tiara, and a mystery diamond floral tiara.

The Princess of Wales also wore her Love Trophy Collar with her Boucheron Loop Tiara and Surrey Fringe Tiara for a series of official portraits in 1905.

Queen Mary continued wearing her Love Trophy Collar after the Accession of King George V in 1910, when it appeared for a series of portraits with a delicate diamond tiara and also with Queen Adelaide’s Fringe Tiara, though Chokers soon fell out of fashion and the Love Trophy Collar was not publicly worn following the First World War.

At some point in the 1930s, the Love Trophy Collar was passed on by Queen Mary to her daughter-in-law, the then Duchess of York and the future Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, though she never wore the Collar in public, and neither was it worn by the late Queen Elizabeth II when she inherited the Queen Mother’s Jewels in 2002. However, the Love Trophy Collar has not been dismantled and was photographed for Hugh Roberts’ ‘The Queen’s Diamonds’ in 2012, currently laying in the vaults awaiting a reappearance!