Ooh, saucy Victoria, you shouldn’t have!
A tiara for her but a VERY naughty* present for him... from devoted pair who practically invented Christmas!
WHEN Prince Harry turned jewellery designer to create Meghan Markle’s engagement ring, he was following a fine Royal tradition.
For his great-great-great-greatgrandfather, Prince Albert, was renowned for the gifts he designed for Queen Victoria.
Now one of his most cherished tokens of love is to feature in the ITV drama Victoria, before going on display in Kensington Palace.
A scene in the programme’s twohour Christmas special shows Albert, played by Tom Hughes, handing over a spectacular emerald and diamond coronet to Victoria (Jenna Coleman)
In return, the Queen hands over an equally striking present – a portrait of herself in an intimate pose, her tresses tumbling over her bare shoulders.
Perhaps surprisingly, this was genuine portrait, and unusually revealing for 1843, when it was painted. In Victoria’s words, it would become ‘my darling Albert’s favourite picture’.
The Queen wrote: ‘I felt so happy and proud to have found something that gave him so much pleasure.’
In actual fact the ‘secret picture’ was given to Albert for his 24th birthday – two years before he presented her with the tiara featured in the TV show. However, it was far from the first item of jewellery the Prince had designed for her.
Victoria’s writer, Daisy Goodwin, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I was so entranced by the tiara. It was such wonderful craftsmanship. Albert took extraordinary pains to create beautiful things for Victoria. It was an evocation of their relationship.
‘ One of the things I wanted to show in the Christmas special was the care and the time they put into giving gifts to each other. They didn’t just go down to the shops and buy some Christmas socks.’
Indeed, it was Victoria’s habit of handing over gifts at the end of the year that widely popularised the idea of Christmas presents.
Although the TV drama uses a replica, the real tiara will go on show in the spring, after the current owners, a family Scottish aristocrats, agreed to put it on display after years hidden in a vault.
Albert spent months liaising with Crown jeweller Joseph Kitching to create the Gothic-style tiara with 19 emerald droplets costing £1,150 0 – an enormous sum for 1845. But it t is not part of the Crown Jewels.
Ms Goodwin said: ‘Albert was the e champion of jewellery – he designed d so many things. He designed a bracelet for Victoria which had miniature portraits of all their children. He designed brooches with their children’s teeth and other r items from the teeth of deer.’