From other threads re: the emeralds (posts were originally by me):
"Here's an interesting article on the subject of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor jewel theft:
http://www.etoile.co.uk/Columns/RoyalScribe/040329.htmlThe pertinent part about the emeralds:
"The rumor goes that when Princess Alexandra of Denmark arrived in England in 1863, she carried with her a valuable collection of uncut emeralds, given to her as a gift from the Danish people. According to the scandalmongers, the then Prince of Wales had inherited these emeralds from Alexandra for the purpose of passing them down to his future wife, the next queen of England. Speculation over the story came to a head just before the abdication when, it was claimed, Wallis’ divorce attorney was sent to retrieve the emeralds from her in Cannes....Even Lady Dudley, the duke and duchess’s hostess at Ednam Lodge, was later quoted as saying that the stolen jewelry box had contained “HRH’s (the duke’s) fantastic collection of Fabergé boxes and a great many uncut emeralds which I believe belonged to Queen Alexandra.”
Shortly after the robbery, the story once again captured the public imagination and gave rise to the theory that the royal family had orchestrated the robbery in an attempt to recover the emeralds once and for all. With little regard to the evidence of the case and with no confirmation that the emeralds had ever even existed, the theory was generally considered to have merit and plagued the duke and duchess throughout their lives. To the modern observer, however, the holes in this theory are glaring.
To begin with, Lady Dudley’s claim that the stolen jewelry box contained “uncut emeralds” that had belonged to Queen Alexandra is ridiculous, as it is highly unlikely that, if they even existed, such important emeralds would have remained uncut for 80 years, especially in the hands of the flashy Duchess of Windsor. Even if the stones had been cut and put into settings, they don’t appear to have been in her jewelry box. The official list of stolen jewels, which was provided to police and the insurance company, includes only one emerald – a ring consisting of a relatively small 7.81-carat square cut stone. Historical accounts of the robbery place a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the list contained the word ‘etcetera,’ and imply that this was a tactic by the duke and duchess to obscure their possession of the emeralds. Perhaps, but it is more likely that ‘etcetera’ was a reference to the mates of the some 18 unmatched earrings recovered on the Sunningdale golf course the following day.
The smaller details out of the way, we can address one of the foundations of the original rumor – that the duke had inherited the emeralds from his grandmother. In fact, Queen Alexandra died intestate in 1925, and her three remaining children – Queen Maud of Norway, Princess Victoria of Wales and King George V (along with Queen Mary) – met together at Sandringham to divide all of her belongings in equal portions among them. Since many of the jewels Alexandra had worn in her lifetime had been considered held in trust for future queens of England, only her truly private collection of jewels remained. If there had been a large cache of important emeralds among her remaining jewels, it’s doubtful that Queen Mary – who had a mania for jewels – would have let go of them so readily, especially to a son she considered irresponsible. Some of the most important emeralds in the present queen’s collection – the Cambridge emeralds and Delhi Durbar emeralds – were acquired by Queen Mary and carefully passed down to her granddaughter.
Whatever was passed to the then Prince of Wales from Alexandra’s belongings came to him via his parents and would have been a matter of public record, at least among the royal family. In fact, it was no secret that Alexandra’s collection of Fabergé boxes, which was stored in the duchess’s jewelry box and had been abandoned during the robbery on one of the windowsills at Ednam Lodge, had been passed down to him after her death.
But if these explanations leave any doubt in the mind, Leslie Field solidly debunks the myth of “Alexandra’s emeralds” and offers a conclusive end to the story in “The Queen’s Jewels: The Personal Collection of Elizabeth II.” Field, whose extensive research into the queen’s collection was helped along by Her Majesty’s Household, confirmed that the precise records of the wedding gifts given to the Victorian Prince and Princess of Wales did not include “a great many uncut emeralds.” There is no doubt that Alexandra received many precious gems upon her marriage, emeralds included, but they were all set into various pieces of jewelry, and there is no record of anything like Lady Dudley and others had suggested. ""
a letter to the Editor to Time magazine in 1937 about the Duke of Windsor, a write wrote in this:
"he dismissed hundreds of employees at Balmoral & Sandringham, and sold off everything on these properties which was salable, and with the money thus saved and raised, he bought priceless emeralds for Mrs. Simpson. These emeralds were the property of Queen Alexandra who left them to Princess Victoria, who in turn sold them to Garrard's of Bond Street, where King Edward bought them. . . .As to the emeralds, I should have added that Garrard's the jewelers who bought them from Princess Victoria, sent them to Cartier's in Paris, and it was actually Cartier's who made the sale, on behalf of Garrard's to King Edward. As I said before, these stones are very large and magnificent, but have many flaws. The lady who gave me this information, is a personal friend of Queen Mary and members of the Royal Family, but I cannot tell you her name.
May I suggest to you that the lady who will be very much in the eye of society, if not the public, will be the Hon. Mrs. Ronald Greville, a very rich lady, who has always been very much with the new King & Queen (indeed their honeymoon was spent at Polesden Lacey, her country house) and who is supposed to have named the Queen as her eventual heiress.
E. A. L. BENNETT Paris, France "
