Lady Sarah Chatto Inherited Three Things From Princess Margaret — And Refused Everything Else D
Princess Margaret died on the 9th of February, 2002 at the age of 71. She left her only daughter, Lady Sarah, exactly seven inheritances. Three of them were objects you could hold in your hand. The other four were patterns, ways of being learned across a lifetime inside a difficult household.
Sarah took the three objects. She took the Snowden floral tiara assembled by the jeweler Wartsky from three diamond brooes her father gave her mother as a wedding gift in 1960. The same three floral brooches her mother wore for over three decades mounted into a tiara frame specifically for Sarah’s own wedding day.
She took the pearl earrings traceable back to a 1942 bequest which appear in photographs across nearly 30 years of her public life. She took a pearl and diamond necklace that specialist sources link back through Margaret to Queen Mary herself. Three objects, three documented lines of inheritance visible in the public record across two decades.
The acceptance was genuine, sustained and photographic. But the other four inheritances, the temper, the grievance, the performance, the certainty that the world owed her its eyes, those she refused, every single one. and she spent more than 20 years proving it in the smallest ways a private woman can.
This is the inventory of what a daughter kept and what she handed back. On the 6th of May 1960, Princess Margaret married photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey in the first royal wedding broadcast on British television. Among his private gifts to her that day were three antique diamond flower brooches, sparkling leaf and petal settings, each one a separate piece.
Specialist sources, including the dedicated tiara reference site, Tiara Mania, confirm they were given by Armstrong Jones on the occasion of the 1960 wedding. Armstrong Jones acquired them specifically for her rather than drawing on family jewels. For the next 18 years, while the marriage lasted, Margaret wore them.
After their divorce in 1978, she kept them through the 1980s. She wore them still to the Queen’s 60th birthday celebrations in April 1986, according to the Daily Express and on other gala occasions. Three separate pieces worn separately, appearing in photographs across three decades of her public life. They were still broaches in 1993 when Margaret’s daughter Sarah began planning her wedding.
Sarah had chosen Jasper Conan to design her gown. According to the Royal Watcher, a specialist royal jewelry blog, Conan saw the three diamond flower brooes in Margaret’s jewelry box and suggested they be made into a tiara. Margaret brought them to Wardsky, the London jeweler. Wartsky built a frame to hold all three pieces together in a single ark.
Crucially, the brooch fittings remained intact, meaning the three pieces could still be worn separately as they always had been. The tiara united them without absorbing them. On the 14th of July 1994, Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones married Daniel Cado at St. Steven Wahbrook, a Christopher Ren church in the city of London. St.
Steven Wahbrook sits a mile from Westminster Abbey, where her parents had married before 300 million television viewers. Hello magazine later described the 1994 ceremony as intimate. She walked in wearing the newly assembled tiara. Three brooches that had crossed a marriage, a divorce, and three decades of her mother’s life now sat together above her veil.
The court jeweler confirms that Sarah wore the tiara and a set of diamond and pearl drop earrings borrowed from Princess Margaret that day, both of which subsequently became Sarah’s own property. Hello magazine in a 2021 piece on the wedding reports the same. The floral brooches combined by Wartsky worn by the bride later inherited.
That is the object’s biography in brief. Father to mother as a gift, mother to daughter as a frame, daughter to every major ceremony since. In September 1942, de Margaret Helen Grarevel died at Psden Lacy, her Suriri estate. She was a society hostess with no children and a large jewelry collection.
Her will left all of her jewels and jewelry to Queen Elizabeth, the future queen mother, with, in her own words, her loving thoughts. Multiple independent sources confirm the bequest. Tatler town and country. The National Trust Pulsden Lacy Records. The collection exceeded 60 pieces delivered to the Queen Mother in a monogram trunk.
It included tiaras, earrings, necklaces, brooches, a comprehensive transfer of one woman’s ornamental life to another. Among that cash, specialist sources identify a set of pearl and diamond drop earrings. The Royal Watcher in a dedicated 2018 article on the pieces describes them as dating possibly from the 1930s and inherited from Mrs.
Grareville by the Queen Mother in 1942. The same source states they passed to Princess Margaret in the 1950s. No primary institutional record confirms the specific chain of custody for these exact earrings. What can be confirmed is that Princess Margaret wore pearl earrings consistent with this description, that they appear at her daughter’s 1994 wedding in the court jeweler’s contemporaneous account, and that Hello Magazine confirmed in 2018.
In an article headlined, why Lady Sarah Shadow wears the same earrings to all royal events, that Sarah consistently wears them to major occasions, and that the pieces are believed to have originated with Mrs. Ronald Gr. That article title is itself a form of documentation. A named mainstream publication in 2018 identified a pattern of consistent wearing across more than two decades, linked the earrings to the Grareville bequest, and noted their appearance at Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s wedding in April 2011, and Zara Phillips and Mike Tindle’s wedding in July 2011. The Royal Watchers 2024 catalog of Sarah’s Jewels adds the golden jubilee service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 2002, the Duke of Edinburghough’s memorial service in 2022, and the coronation of King Charles III in May 2023 as additional
appearances. The court jeweler’s coronation roundup confirms that at Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May, 2023, Sarah wore pearl and diamond earrings from her late mother with suspected gravel providence. 30 years from the 1994 wedding to the 2023 coronation, the same earrings or something very close to them at every major ceremonial occasion in between.
30 years of the same inherited pieces at every jubilee, memorial, and coronation. That is what deliberate wearing looks like. Quiet and correct and undramatic. A pearl and diamond alternating rivier appears in photographs of Lady Sarah at the Queen’s 80th birthday dinner in 2006 and at both royal weddings in 2011.
The court jeweler in a detailed 2022 article on Princess Margaret’s diamond necklaces notes that Sarah wore this pearl and diamond necklace at the diamond jubilee service in June 2012, stacked with the shorter King George V 6th diamond necklace she also inherited and describes the pearl and diamond piece as having belonged to Margaret via Queen Mary.
That parenthetical via Queen Mary is the specialist’s own careful phrasing, not a formally documented providence chain. Here is what can be confirmed. Queen Mary owned multiple diamond Rivier. One of them, the Lady Mount Steven necklace, 34 graduated old cut diamonds, silver and gold circa 1900, passed from Queen Mary to Princess Margaret and was sold at Christy’s in June 2006 for £993,600, the highest priced jewel in the entire sale. That piece is gone.
What the specialist sources point to when they describe Sarah wearing something via Queen Mary is a separate pearl and diamond necklace whose connection to Queen Mary rests on visual identification rather than a will or bequest record. The royal watcher’s own 2025 entry on the piece describes it as having no known provenence while still tentatively placing it in the Queen Mary collection.
Three generations of women, grandmother, mother, daughter, connected by a necklace whose history the paper trail supports only part way. That limitation is real. Not every inheritance arrives with paperwork. In June 2006, Christy’s held two sales of Princess Margaret’s possessions. The jewelry and fabraier catalog ran to 185 lots.
A separate sale of silver, furniture, and works of art added 582 more. Margaret had left an estate valued at 7.7 million pounds at probate filed with the London court on the 15th of April 2002 and confirmed in the Guardian’s 2022 report on Windsor family wealth. The Guardian’s coverage of the Christy’s jewelry sale, published that June, put the expected proceeds at approximately £3 million and stated directly that the money would be used to help pay inheritance taxes.
Antiques and the Arts Weekly, a specialist trade publication, confirmed the combined 2-day result, $25,14,742. The PTO tiara, the one Margaret had bought for herself in 1959 for £5,500 and worn on her wedding day, sold for £926,400. The Lady Mount Steven diamond necklace, the confirmed Queen Mary piece, sold for £993,600.
The catalog included Margaret’s Faber, her furnishings, her silver, the objects of a life collected across seven decades. What wasn’t in the catalog was the Snowden floral tiara, the Grareville pearl earrings, the pearl and diamond necklace, the King George V 6th diamond necklace, a wheat ear brooch, a diamond star brooch, several other pieces now documented in Lady Sarah’s possession by specialist sources.
From approximately 767 lots sold for more than $25 million. These were the things she kept. Christies had everything they were given. The pieces Sarah retained were never offered. The choice is visible in the absence. What wasn’t on the auction floor tells you as much as what was. The behavioral inheritance is harder to inventory.
There is no Christy’s catalog for character, but there is a substantial body of named firhand testimony about Princess Margaret, and it points consistently toward a set of recognizable traits. Craig Brown’s 2017 book, Ma’am, Darling, built its portrait from 99 glimpses drawn from diaries, memoirs, interviews, and firstirhand accounts.
The Guardian’s Review called it the examination of a thoroughly rotten royal laid uporiously bare. The picture that emerges encompasses genuine wit and charm alongside cruelty that is documented, attributed, and specific to an architect who had worked on Glamus Castle.
I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home to the same man who had walked with a disability since childhood. Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk? The Guardian reviewer noted she wore her rudeness as Tommy Cooper did his feez. It was her trademark. Anne Glen Connor published Lady in Waiting in 2019, a memoir of 30 years as Margaret’s closest confidant.
Glenn Connor wrote it by her own account in a December 2019 spectator piece because she was so fed up with people writing such horrible things about Princess Margaret. The book is a partial defense and yet the defense contains its evidence. When Margaret fell ill away from home, unfamiliar with the servants in the house, she refused to let anyone but Glenn Connor enter her room.
Glenn Connor slept beside her, managed her hygiene, brought her food, kept her entertained. When Glen Connor briefly escaped to swim, Margaret summoned her back within minutes. The Australia Tour memoir excerpts published by Oprah Daly show the same structure across 1975. Margaret’s will navigated through quiet diplomacy rather than confronted because confronting it directly wasn’t an option for people in her orbit.
That is one pattern, the certainty of attention, the settled conviction that the room arranged itself around her presence. A second, the performance. Margaret was genuinely funny, and she knew it. George V 6th had described Elizabeth as his pride and Margaret as his joy. The dynamic shaped her early.
She was the one everyone laughed with, the one Craig Brown characterizes as Britain’s Aboriginal postwar celebrity. By the time she died in 2002, the New York Review of Books noted in its assessment of Brown’s book, she had slid to 22nd in the line of succession and retreated to Kensington Palace.
the performance had outlasted the stage. A third, the grievance. The accounts that accumulate across Brown’s 99 glimpses, across Glen Connor<unk>’s memoir, across the diaries of the people who surrounded her, return consistently to the same structure, the sense that the world had taken something from her and owed her acknowledgement of the debt.
Her memorialists, sympathetic and otherwise, treat it as the central wound. A fourth, the temper, distinct from the wit deployed strategically. This is the anger that arrived without warning at waiters, at architects, at organizers who had scheduled something she didn’t want to do. Brown’s book is full of documented instances.
So are the diaries and memoirs of the people who lived inside her social circle. What Lady Sarah Cado’s adult record shows across more than 30 years is the sustained absence of all four. No documented public temper, no press escalations of her own making, no feuds on the record, no interviews in which she says anything about anything.
A 2024 appointment as president of the Royal Ballet School, the position her mother held from 1956 until her death in 2002, was announced by the school without a direct quote from Sarah. Her sons, Samuel David Benedict Cado, born in July 1996, and Arthur Robert Nathaniel Cado, born in February 1999, use the surname Cado.
Neither holds a royal title. Neither is styled as a Windsor. The decision to name them Chado rather than Mountbatten Windsor was made at birth, announced to no one with no press statement attached. 30 years of marriage to Daniel Cado, no separation reported, no scandal of her own manufacturer, an artistic career conducted under her own name, without a royal prefix, and without the infrastructure of attention.
a close relationship with her cousin King Charles expressed through attendance at family occasions and through accepting the Royal Ballet School role, but expressed without press releases, without positioning, without the machinery of profile management. You can’t photograph a choice not made. What you can photograph are the earrings at jubilee after jubilee, at wedding after wedding, at the coronation of a new king.
And note that the woman wearing them has never once demanded that a room notice her. The jewels do the public work. The woman wearing them does not. She kept three things. A tiara her father built out of brooes. An earring with a paper trail that runs from a suri estate in 1942 to a Westminster Abbey coronation in 2023. a necklace that specialist sources link back through her mother to her grandmother.
You can see all three in the photographs at jubilees and weddings and a coronation worn quietly, correctly without a word. And then there were the other four, the ones with no provenence and no glitter. The temper, the grievance, the performance, the certainty that a room owes you its eyes. Those she handed back for more than 20 years.
She demonstrated in the smallest and most consistent ways available to a private woman that the behavioral inheritance of a difficult household is a choice and not a destiny. She kept what was worth keeping. She refused what wasn’t worth carrying. The proof is the woman with her mother’s earrings in a drawer and her own name on the gallery wall. Subscribe for more stories like
