The name ‘Mrs Ronnie Greville’ sets off shivers of delight among royal jewellery connoisseurs. Why? Because some of the most spectacular pieces in the House of Windsor’s vault once belonged to this woman, born in St John’s Wood in 1863 as Margaret Helen Anderson. The working-class daughter of a Scottish servant, she inveigled her way into British aristocracy’s inner circle, becoming revered by politicians and potentates. With charm and cunning, she rose from illegitimate obscurity to the highest echelons of Edwardian society; her unimaginable wealth matched only by the power and influence she wielded over the most prominent figures of the early 20th century.
Margaret’s life was laced with scandal from the off. Her registered parents were Helen and William Anderson, a serving girl and porter who shared the same surname but were unmarried. In fact, Margaret’s true father was the bachelor William McEwan, millionaire founder of Edinburgh’s Fountain Brewery – and boss of William Anderson. When Helen fell pregnant, McEwan enlisted this trusted and conveniently named employee in a plan that would spare his dependants the stigma of so-called ‘bastardy’. The pseudo-Mr and Mrs Anderson moved to London, where Margaret was born, before soon returning to Scotland. Helen, now a supposed widow, would go on to become an Edinburgh landlady; William returned to his family – in the same city – and was amply compensated for the subterfuge.
In November 1885, the boarding-house matron Anderson and the fabulously wealthy McEwan were discreetly married in Pimlico, and the decades-old rumour of their dalliance became irrefutable. Margaret became McEwan’s ‘step-daughter’, and he let it be known that she would inherit his immense fortune. (By the time he died in 1913, he was worth over £1.5 million; £140 million today.) Whatever her origins, this made her quite a catch for the Hon Ronald Greville, son of the 2nd Baron Greville: one of a generation of cash-strapped landed gentry who sought betrothal to new-money heiresses.
Ronnie and Margaret married at St Mark’s church in Mayfair on 25 April 1891; the bride wore white satin and Brussels lace, along with a diamond tiara worth £50,000, a gift from her ‘step-father’. And so began Maggie Anderson’s new life as Mrs Ronnie Greville, a bona fide member of the blue-blooded elite. Thanks to their friendship with Alice Keppel – the favourite mistress of ‘Bertie’, Prince of Wales – the couple were ensconced in the future king’s inner circle. In 1906, they bought Polesden Lacey, a grand country estate near Great Bookham, Surrey. They enlisted celebrated architects Charles Mewès and Arthur Davis, who had recently designed London’s Ritz hotel, to refurbish it; and they spared no expense in creating a saloon ‘fit for entertaining maharajas’, alongside a sumptuous private suite for their royal chum (now Edward VII). But before the sovereign could visit, Ronald Greville was diagnosed with cancer; he died of pneumonia in 1908 at the age of 43, and Margaret was forced to adopt the unexpected new persona of a society widow.
She rallied with gumption, signalling her return to the social calendar by hosting her notoriously tricky monarch at Polesden Lacey – he remarked that she had a ‘positive genius’ for hospitality – and so maintained her status among His Majesty’s closest confidantes. After he died in 1910, she befriended the new Queen Mary, wife of George V, with whom she shared a love of jewellery. The two women bought voraciously, commissioning and resetting jewels with abandon. Mrs Greville frequented the likes of Cartier, Fabergé and Garrard, had her pearls restrung yearly and remodelled her Boucheron tiara four times.
According to biographer Siân Evans, the author of Mrs Ronnie: The Society Hostess Who Collected Kings, Margaret Greville’s jewellery boasted the noble antecedents she lacked: ‘She acquired Marie Antoinette’s diamond necklace, the Empress Joséphine’s emeralds and diamonds, and a diamond ring that had once belonged to Catherine the Great.’ When an American guest dropped a diamond and others scuttled around searching for it, Mrs Greville produced a magnifying glass, drily remarking, ‘Perhaps this may be of assistance.’ Asked her opinion of Lady Granard’s pearls, writes Evans, she responded with ‘a shudder, saying, “I thought it better not to look”’.
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According to one report – by Sir Conran Corfield, who met Mrs Greville during a tour of India in 1921 – she owned jewels which ‘a maharaja would envy’, including ‘emeralds, which… seemed to cover her from forehead to fingers’, and ‘diamonds of equal magnificence and extent’. In exchange for a reduction in insurance premiums, she travelled with copies of them all – secretly switching from fake to real and real to fake, so that no one knew which was which. ‘She was not only rich but prudent; she was also very good company,’ concluded Corfield.
In 1914, the childless Mrs Greville let it be known that she intended to bequeath Polesden Lacey to Prince Albert, later known as George VI, and secured her position at court. After the First World War, she assumed the unofficial role of aristocratic matchmaker, helping to facilitate the marriage of her goddaughter Sonia Keppel and the Hon Roland Cubitt, as well as that of Prince Albert and the petite, pretty Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the future Queen Consort). In 1920, Albert had been made Duke of York. In April 1923, he took his newly-wed duchess on a honeymoon to Polesden Lacey, staying in the private suite that Mrs Greville, by then a dame, had designed for his grandfather.
As a sexagenarian, Mrs Greville continued to entertain and travel with the enthusiasm of a woman half her age. Although she had successfully ingratiated herself with stellar society, she remained a divisive character. For every glowing report of her ‘marvellous personality… wide tolerance and all-embracing kindliness’, there are accounts describing her as ‘an old bag’ or ‘a fat slug filled with venom’. One Lady Leslie is said to have exclaimed: ‘Maggie Greville! I would sooner have an open sewer in my drawing room!’ And there is no doubt she had a venomous streak. ‘There is no one on earth quite so skilfully malicious as old Maggie,’ wrote politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon.
After the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII, with whom Mrs Greville had never managed to curry favour, her beloved Albert became George VI – and she sat in the royal box at his coronation. Despite failing health, the wheelchair-bound grande dame continued to don her finest jewels throughout that decade and into the Second World War. And rather than retreat to an air-raid shelter, she sat out the Blitz by holding dinner parties in her suite at The Dorchester, decked out in her finest emeralds, ‘because one might as well… go out in style’, writes Evans.
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Mrs Greville joined King George and Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral for the last time in August 1942. On 15 September that year, she died at The Dorchester from a cerebral thrombosis. She was buried in The Ladies’ Garden at Polesden Lacey, and newspapers published tributes to her wit, perspicacity and generosity. But her most significant legacy was the Greville bequest, the fruits of which are still not entirely publicly known.
In the end, Mrs Greville left Polesden Lacey and its entire contents to the National Trust, rather than to the King. But she bequeathed ‘with my loving thoughts’ more than 60 pieces of jewellery to Queen Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother. The latter would write to her widowed royal mother-in-law: ‘Mrs Greville has left me her jewels… dear old thing, and I feel very touched… It is rather exciting to be left something, and I do admire beautiful stones with all my heart.’ And in return, she received this reply: ‘How kind of Mrs Greville to leave you her jewels, and she had some lovely pearls and nice emeralds too, I think… I can understand your pleasure… I never had any such luck – but I am not really jealous.’
Despite her protests, Queen Mary was surely green-eyed when she saw the contents of the trunk marked ‘MHG, Polesden Lacey’. The Greville bequest included the spectacular five-row diamond Festoon necklace, a suite of emeralds that reportedly belonged to Empress Joséphine, several pairs of diamond earrings, brooches and rings. Then there was the Boucheron honeycomb tiara: a favourite of George VI’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, it has been frequently worn by Queen Camilla, who happens to be the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel. Some believe the five-carat emerald-cut diamond with which King Charles proposed to Camilla was also once owned by Mrs Greville.
Queen Elizabeth greatly enjoyed wearing Mrs Greville’s jewels, as did her daughter, Princess Elizabeth – later Elizabeth II – who was given Mrs Greville’s Cartier ivy-leaf clips for her 21st birthday, in 1947, and her jaw-dropping Cartier chandelier earrings for her wedding the same year. (Those earrings were most recently seen on the Princess of Wales at the wedding of the Crown Prince and Princess of Jordan.) Another favourite of both the Queen Mother and her daughter was a pair of Cartier earrings set with two pear-cut diamonds each weighing over 20 carats.
When the Queen Mother died in 2002, the Greville jewels were inherited by Queen Elizabeth II, and they remain in regular use by working royals. The Boucheron emerald and diamond tiara worn by Princess Eugenie on her wedding day began its life as Margaret Greville’s; as did the ruby and diamond Boucheron necklace worn by the then-Duchess of Cambridge at a Spanish state banquet in 2017. Mrs Ronnie’s jewels radiate the splendour of a bygone era; one in which a lowly servant’s daughter could successfully reinvent herself as a ‘collector of kings’. After her death, the then-queen, her beneficiary, wrote: ‘I shall miss her very much indeed… She was so shrewd, so kind and so amusingly unkind, so sharp, such fun, so naughty… altogether a real person, a character.’ Love her or hate her, there will never be another Margaret Greville.
This article was first published in Tatler’s Watches and Jewellery Guide 2023, on sale with the December issue
