GLITTERING GIFT FOR GRANNY VICTORIA

In the summer of 1897 Queen Victoria was inundated with gifts to mark the 60th anniversary of her accession to the throne. None meant more to her than this diamond and sapphire brooch, a joint gift from her second daughter Princess Alice’s children.

Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1862 and they had seven children. A son, Friedrich, died aged two in 1873 after falling through his mother’s bedroom window. Their youngest daughter Marie died of diphtheria aged four, and Princess Alice also succumbed to it and died in December 1878.

Queen Victoria saw herself as the guardian to the surviving five children – Victoria (later grandmother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh), Elisabeth (who married the Grand Duke Sergei of Russia), Irene, Ernest and Alexandra (known as ‘Alicky’, later Empress of Russia as the wife of Nicholas II).

Following the death of Prince Louis in 1892 the Queen wrote to Victoria, eldest of the Hesse grandchildren, ‘Orphans! It is awful. But I am still there & while I live Alicky, till she has married, will be more than ever my own child.’

The brooch, thought to be made by Fabergé, has a silver heart mounted with diamonds, surmounted by a sapphire and enclosing in Slavonic characters the number 60. Suspended from two diamond-set pendants are two large cabochon sapphires (shaped and polished, rather than faceted). Victoria left it to her third daughter Princess Helena. It has since returned to the Royal Collection and is often worn by the Duchess of Cornwall.