Altogether, they make up surely the supreme compilation of diamonds in the world. Now in the honor of her Diamond Jubilee, the Queen has approved the first public study and display of these astounding symbols of splendor.
These are the ‘other Crown Jewels’, the ones which do not rest in the Tower of London. They reside at Buckingham Palace, or anywhere the Queen happens to need them. These diamonds are not set in ceremonial regalia like orbs or scepters, restricted to imperial rituals.
They are infact ‘heirlooms of the Crown’, handed down from Queen to Queen and adorned for everything from a royal awayday to a family wedding or a state banquet.
Some are at once identifiable, like the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara, a wedding present to Queen Mary in 1893.
Other are less eminent but equally well-loved. Queen Elizabeth’s Canadian Maple Leaf Brooch, for instance was a present from George VI to his wife ahead of their 1939 tour of Canada.
The Queen Mother cherished the brooch till her death in 2002, from where onwards it passed to the Queen. She, in turn, lent it to the Canada-bound duchess of Cambridge last summer for her first regal tour.
However it was the brooch that told the more touching tale.  There is a captivating history to every one of almost 100 pieces included in The Queen’s Diamonds, by Sir Hugh Roberts, former director and now Surveyor Emeritus of the Royal Collection.
Not only he has been permitted to handle these treasures with the Queen’s Curator of Jewelry, Angela Kelly, but he has had access to the archives and accounts of various royal jewelers, too.
So we learn about the rich history of Queen Victoria’s Fringe Brooch, which resulted from a visit by Sultan Abdul Mejid 1 of Turkey in 1856.
Victoria then spent £450 at the royal jewelers, Garrard who set the stones in a fairly racy Chaine De Corsage, which she liked to wear on top of a low-cut bodice, bringing added glint to the royal embonpoint.
All of that changed with the unfortunate demise of Prince Albert in 1861. ‘The chaine de corsage may have been considered too glitzy by the Queen for her widow and sombre state,’ notes Sir Hugh. So, some of the diamonds were detached for use somewhere else while the rest of the chaine became a brooch, passed down through the generations.
The Queen Mother wore it at the Coronation in 1953. The Queen persists to wear it to this day. It rejoiced a prominent outing only last year for the state banquet in honor of the President of Turkey, a noble nod to the Sultan’s kindness more than 150 years earlier.
Throughout history, crowned heads have declared their power and status with gold, silver, rubies, sapphires, emeralds and so forth, up until the 17th century, it was the men who wore the most excellent pieces. By the dawn of the 18th century, diamonds gained greater distinction as the cutting methods were improved.
The first serious diamond-wearer was Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who brought a large collection from her native Hanover to the British Court.
‘The King never let her appear in public without them,’ Sir Hugh extends. However, when her fifth son, Ernest, became King of Hanover, he insisted the return of the lot.
After a lengthened legal battle (conducted in the British courts), the gems went back to Hanover in 1857. ‘Queen Victoria was horrified,’ Sir Hugh reflects.
Nevertheless, she too took pleasure in the fruits of British imperial expansion across some of the richest diamond fields in the world. Significant rocks were presented to the Royal Family as ‘tributes of Empire’, not least the Koh-i-Nur from Lahore.
Diamonds were the new royal gold. Moreover, after Albert’s death, the Queen avoided all forms of colored jewellery, sticking to diamonds and pearls as a substitute.
At the same time, the future Queen Alexandra — then Princess of Wales — was setting new trends in jewellery design. Thanks to her, the dog-collar necklace became the order of the day (it was actually her way of covering up a scar on her neck).
In 1905, South Africa produced the largest specimen ever found, the Cullinan Diamond. It was duly presented to Edward VII and cut into nine major stones, ranked in order of size.
Alexandra liked to wear the two largest as a colossal brooch, although succeeding monarchs have taken a less merry attitude.
Today ‘Cullinan I’, the Star of Africa, sits in the Queen’s Sceptre while ‘Cullinan II’ – the Second Star of Africa – is in her Imperial State Crown.
However, the rest — often known in the family as ‘Granny’s Chips’ — were rearranged in a variety of jaw-dropping brooches. Cullinan VII, for the moment, is to be found with a string of emeralds (won by an earlier Duchess of Cambridge in a German state lottery, would you believe) hanging from a fabulous thing called Queen Mary’s Delhi Durbar Necklace.
if anyone could be expressed as the true Queen of diamonds, it was Queen Mary. Long before her companion became George V, she already had a large collection of her own. Indeed, at the time of her wedding in 1893, the public display of gifts included 3 tiaras, 26 bracelets, 44 brooches and 15 necklaces.
She also inherited some jewels from her mother, the Duchess of Teck. Others, however, had been left to Mary’s wayward brother, Prince Francis of Teck. He died young in 1910, having left his share of the family gems to his mistress, Lady Kilmorey (a former squeeze of Edward VII).
Mary was having none of this and insisted on paying whatever it took to retrieve her beloved mother’s rocks from the frisky Lady K.
One of these reclaimed treasures, The Duchess of Teck’s Emperor of Austria Brooch, would go on to be a firm favourite of our present Queen – whether for family photo shoots with Cecil Beaton or for last year’s State banquet in honour of President Obama.
Queen Mary was always dreaming up new uses for her diamonds. Nearly 30 years after her wedding, she merged two wedding presents – a £170 diamond brooch from the people of Swansea and another from the Maharaja of Kapurthla – into what is now known as Queen Mary’s Stomacher.
Many of the world’s finest diamonds belonged to the Romanovs. But as the Russian revolution unfolded, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna used an English aristocrat to smuggle out her prize specimens to relatives on the continent. In 1921, Queen Mary bought several pieces, including the Vladimir Tiara, still in regular use.
Often, though, she would just go shopping. Queen Mary’s Lover’s Knot Brooch, for example, was the result of a trip to Garrard — where she paid £345 for it in 1933. The present Queen often wears it for special family occasions, notably the weddings of Prince William and Princess Margaret.
Throughout the 20th century, the royal jewellery collection continued to receive welcome additions from wealthy admirers. Most generous of all was the society hostess, Mrs Ronnie Greville, the childless widowed daughter of a brewing magnate.
On her death in 1942, she left her jewellery box (it was actually a tin trunk) to Queen Elizabeth. The collection stretched to more than 60 superb pieces, many from Cartier where Mrs Greville would regularly spend tens of thousands of pounds.
Among the most spectacular bequests were the Greville Tiara and the Greville Festoon Necklace, both of which the Queen has now loaned to the Duchess of Cornwall.
Despite all the world-class sparklers that were at her disposal, the Queen Mother preferred a more understated style to that of her predecessors.
The present Queen is the same. Rather than piling necklace upon necklace and sprouting brooches like rosebuds, the Monarch has relatively modest tastes in what Sir Hugh calls ‘daywear’ – a nice pair of earrings, a pearl necklace and a brooch or two.
However, when a State occasion demands it, she is happy to bring out the biggest and the best.
She herself has made some important additions to the collection. Among her wedding presents was the Nizam of Hyderabad Necklace and Rose Brooches (despite his generosity, the Nizam never made it to the wedding).
As a Princess, she was also the recipient of the Williamson Diamond Brooch, a platinum flower sprouting the finest pink diamond ever found.
This 23.6-carat wonder was unearthed in Tanzania by Dr John Williamson, a Canadian geologist and ardent monarchist, who gave it to the Queen as a wedding present. She, in turn, wore it to the weddings of the Prince of Wales, Prince Edward and Lord Linley.
More recent gifts include the King Khalid Necklace, presented to the Queen during a visit to Saudi Arabia in 1979. It was one of many pieces which the Queen would lend to the Princess of Wales.
The book also tells the touching story of the Queen’s Flame Lily Brooch, a 21st birthday present from the children of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Every child in the former colony donated a ‘tickey’ — a three-pence coin — to raise the funds.
And it was this brooch which she chose to wear for her dramatic homecoming in February 1952, as she set foot on British soil for the first time as Queen.
As this superb book illustrates, these are not simply jewels. Each has played its own part, large or small, in British royal history. And in a couple of months, we can see them for ourselves when a selection of these pieces form the centrepiece of this summer’s Buckingham Palace exhibition.
After all, you can’t have a Diamond Jubilee without some diamonds.
The Queen’s Diamonds by Hugh Roberts is published by Royal Collection Publications (£60); Buckingham Palace and the exhibition, Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration, open from June 30–July 8 and July 31–October 7, 2012. Further information: www.royalcollection.org.uk
