The Widow Who Wore Her Dead Husband s Opals to the Queen s Coronation

She could have worn the largest diamonds in the family vault. Instead, on the morning of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Mary, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, reached for a necklace of dark black opals — a gift from a husband who had been dead for more than two years.

This is the story of the widow behind one of the most quietly moving jewels at the coronation: a woman who had buried her son, her son's young wife — Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy — and her husband, and who carried her grief through Westminster Abbey where no one would think to look. It is also the story of one of England's greatest families selling its Rembrandts, its land, and even a house to survive crushing death duties — while refusing, to the very end, to part with its diamonds.

From the black opals set by Cartier, to a borrowed robe more than a hundred years old with a river of diamonds sewn to its neckline, to the two Duchesses of Devonshire who walked into that abbey wearing a fortune they could no longer truly afford — this is the hidden history of the Devonshire jewels, and the women who wore them.