Royal Jewels and the Tragic Fates of Their Owners

An eighteen-year-old Spanish queen received a ring as a gift — and just five months later, she was dead. The jewel passed from one member of the royal family to another, until five names were eventually linked to it and the family finally gave the ring to the Virgin of the Almudena. In Vienna, a young empress’s wedding tiara fell to the floor before her marriage, while in London the owner of another mysterious stone became so desperate to be rid of it that he threw it into Regent’s Canal — only to claim that it somehow found its way back to him.
You may believe in curses, or you may be deeply sceptical. I certainly have my doubts. But tonight, we are going into the darker corners of royal jewellery history, where old superstitions, strange coincidences and very real tragedies became almost impossible to separate from the jewels themselves.
I do not believe that jewels carry curses. But I do believe that some coincidences are so strange, and some histories so unsettling, that on Halloween they deserve to be told exactly as they were remembered.