When the Platinum Jubilee properly gets into swing next week, Queen Elizabeth will likely use the opportunity to showcase some of her most precious diamonds and gemstones. But for the first major event of the jubilee, A Gallop Through History, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show earlier this month, she eschewed more of her finery and dressed down. In a blue silk floral dress, blue cardigan, and gray shawl studded with crystals, she looked more like your average grandmother than Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. She did, however, indulge in one display of regal luxury by sporting what appeared to be a triple-strand pearl necklace.
Ultimately, the queen’s devotion to pearls may be a hallmark of her style; even her most casual outfits are held together with a bit of luster. Two days before the pageant, she visited the show to watch her own horse compete, and was spotted wearing a white shirt and thick navy blue cardigan, along with pearl earrings and a strand of pearls visible around her neck. The queen has an incomparable jewelry collection that she doesn’t always get a chance to show off, but the stalwarts in her wardrobe are her vast collection of pearl necklaces. She has so many, in fact, that even the experts can have a difficult time telling which is which.
Unlike her more extravagant gems, which are kept in leather cases and polished by her dresser and close friend Angela Kelly, the queen keeps a selection of her most frequently worn jewelry on trays sorted by color. In her 2019 book describing her work, The Other Side of the Coin, Kelly explained that the queen sometimes needs assistance with the more complicated jewelry and difficult clasps, but she can handle the everyday pieces herself. Kelly also offered one reason why the queen is so fond of pearl jewelry: She is extremely fond of brightly colored skirt suits, dresses, and hats, and pearls can help “soften” a color.
From Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images.
There’s also a sentimental meaning behind her affinity for the gemstone. A handful of the queen’s most beloved pieces of pearl jewelry were gifts from her relatives. Her grandmother, Queen Mary, left her one of her favorite pairs of earrings, large single-button pearls with a tiny diamond affixed to each. Button pearls are formed when an incomplete pearl is attached to the side of an oyster, leaving them with a flat bottom that makes them ideal for earrings. On her wedding day, the queen’s parents gave her two pearl necklaces that belonged to Anne and Caroline, two queens from the 17th and 18th centuries. As her devoted private secretary, Jock Colville, later recounted in his edited diaries, she wanted to wear the necklaces during the ceremony but realized at the last minute that they were on public display with the rest of her wedding gifts. Colville rushed to fetch the pearls, borrowing a limousine from the queen’s great-uncle, King Haakon VII of Norway, to beat the traffic. While the button-pearl earrings are in her regular rotation, she only brings out the Queen Anne and Queen Caroline necklaces, with their sumptuous and creamy spheres, on rare occasions. One of the last times she wore the button earrings along with the two strands of pearls happened during her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.
The queen’s love for pearls goes back to the very beginning. In March 1927, when then Princess Elizabeth was just 11 months old, her parents, the Queen Mother and King George VI, left her in the care of her grandmother, Queen Mary. At that time, The New York Times reported on Elizabeth’s penchant for biting Mary’s pearl necklaces. During a visit to the Home Arts and Industries Exhibition, Mary bought a strand of colored beads in an attempt to give Elizabeth a distraction. “These beads are for the baby to bite,” Mary remarked, per the newspaper. “She will insist on trying to bite my necklaces.” By age three, she was first photographed in a necklace with six pearls on its chain, to which her parents would continue to add more throughout her childhood.
The British royal association with pearls, however, dates back to the Middle Ages, and monarchs as early as Edward II, who ruled in the 14th century, were known to wear them. By the time Queen Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, expeditions to the Americas had begun to return with copious amounts of pearls, and as Dona Dirlam, Elise Misiorowski, and Sally Thomas explained in the summer 1985 issue of Gems & Gemology, she imbued them with a sense of “power, opulence, and regal dignity.” Pearls started to denote a sense of purity and chastity, and because of her reputation as the “Virgin Queen,” they were deeply associated with her reign. When she died in 1603, a wax effigy showed her in the jewelry and celebratory poems mentioned her enthusiasm for them. The Imperial State Crown, which the queen wore at her coronation and many state openings of parliament, contains a set of pearls believed to have belonged to Elizabeth I.