The Crown Made for the Queen Mother Alone — and the One She Wore for Fifty Years Instead

A crown of pure platinum was made for Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother — and for the last fifty years of her life, she barely wore it at all. This is the story of the jewel she chose instead.

When King George VI died in 1952, his widow kept everything but the throne she had never actually held: her title, her rank of "Her Majesty," her place second only to the new Queen. Yet the magnificent crown made for her alone in 1937 — the only British crown of pure platinum — went into the dark of the Tower of London, worn just once more, lowered to a plain circlet, at her own daughter's coronation. In its place, at banquet after banquet for the next half-century, she wore a diamond tiara that was hers in a way the crown never could be: the Boucheron "honeycomb," left to her by the society hostess Margaret Greville, and hers outright.

Through the Castle of Mey, Clarence House, the racing, and a life of her own quiet design, these two jewels — the crown she set down and the tiara she chose — trace how a wartime Queen Consort became the best-loved matriarch the monarchy has ever known: keeping her stature, and letting go of the role.

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