Margaret of York's Crown

Royal weddings have always been a source of great spectacle and public interest.  The same held true for a wedding in 1461 uniting Princess Margaret, daughter of the 3rd Duke of York and Cecily de Neville, to Charles the Bold, future Duke of Burgundy.  The crown, custom made for Margaret in 1461 is a golden circlet or coronet.  It's topped with enameled White roses, for the House of York, surrounded with a band of pearls and contains Margaret's monogrammed M around the band.  No one knows who made it.  At the wedding, Charles is described as wearing an equally splendid gold crown.  Perhaps it was a wedding gift from him or his family to his new bride.

The festivities surrounding their wedding continued for days in the Burgundian capital city of Bruges.  The memory of them so made their mark on Bruges' citizens that parts of the wedding are reenacted every few years, the last occasion being in 2012.  Meanwhile, sometime after her death, Margaret's beautiful crown ended up in the Cathedral Treasury of Aachen Cathedral.  Aachen is in Germany.  While we don't know when or exactly how a crown in Bruges, now part of Belgium, wound up in Germany, it's fairly easy to guess the eventually circumstances that brought this important piece to a place in which it would be kept safe for future generations.  Charles the Bold had a daughter Mary, from his first marriage.  Mary married into the Austrian Habsburg family, Maximilian of Austria.  She would later die, leaving him a widow with two young children.  Margaret would raise their son Phillip for several years before her own death in 1503.  By that time, Maximilian was the first Holy Roman Emperor of the Habsburg dynasty.  Aachen was the city where Holy Roman Emperors were crowned.  With Margaret's childless death, her jewelry and personal effects would have passed into Phillip of Burgundy's possession and eventually into that of his family, the Habsburgs of Austria.  At some point, this beautiful crown from an English princess made its way into the treasury of Aachen's cathedral.

Like the Crown of Princess Blanche, which is in the possession of the treasury of the Residenz Palace in Munich, this is only one of two English crowns dating from the pre-Civil War era that are known to survive.  During the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell ordered the Crown Jewels and other regalia to be sold for the value of their gold and gems.  With the exception of a few minor pieces, all the other crowns, scepters, orbs and other objets d'art would have been scrapped out and lost forever.  These two crowns, worn by English princesses far from home, are faint glimmers of the lost glory that was the Plantagenet dynasty at its height.  In yet another miraculous twist, Aachen and its cathedral were heavily bombed during World War II.  It's a wonder that any of its famous treasurers, including Charlemagne's Throne and a jeweled bust containing his skull, survived, but they did.