On the 15th anniversary of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall’s wedding in Edinburgh, take a closer look at the historic Greek Key tiara that the bride wore on her big day.
Two royal weddings bookended the British summer of 2011. The first, in April, was the lavish ceremony of Prince William and Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey. The internationally televised event was attended by almost 2,000 guests, with many thousands more thronging the streets to catch a glimpse of the royal couple in their carriage (the day had been declared a national public holiday).
The second, on 30th July 2011, was the wedding of William’s cousin, Zara Phillips, and rugby player Mike Tindall, who tied the knot in a much lower-key affair at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh.
Despite its smaller scale, Zara Tindall’s wedding did have some fabulous royal flourishes – such as the bride’s beautiful diamond-studded tiara. The Greek Key tiara (AKA the Meander Tiara) was Zara’s ‘something borrowed’ for the day, loaned to her by her mother, Princess Anne.
But its history stretches much further back. Believed to have been created around 1900, possibly by Cartier (the historian Geoffrey C Munn has noted the similarity between its design and that of another tiara in Cartier’s records), the tiara is made up of diamonds set in a traditional ‘Greek key’ pattern (hence its name) punctuated with two honeysuckle motifs, and its central brilliant-cut diamond is framed by a laurel wreath.
The headpiece originally belonged to Princess Alice of Battenberg, mother of the late Prince Philip, who gave it as a wedding present to the then-Princess Elizabeth, when she and Philip married in 1947. It has remained in the British Royal Family’s collection ever since.
Though it’s not known if Queen Elizabeth ever wore the Greek Key tiara, her only daughter, Princess Anne, began to borrow the piece in the late 1960s. In 1972, the Queen officially transferred ownership of the tiara to Anne, who has worn it many times since – most notably for the State Opening of Parliament in 1970 and for her official 50th birthday portrait, taken by John Swannell in 2000.
In borrowing the Greek Key tiara from her mother for her 2011 wedding, Zara Tindall followed in the royal footsteps of both her mother and grandmother, who had also been loaned their nuptial tiaras. Princess Anne had borrowed the Queen Mary Fringe tiara from Queen Elizabeth for her wedding in 1973, much as the late Queen had borrowed the same tiara from her own mother when she married Prince Phillip in 1947.
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