Jewels and the woman: The romance, magic and art of feminine adornment

History and fiction throughout the ages find mystery, glamour and romance in the stories of great jewels. The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most successful of all romances, has its hero achieve his goal by finding a hidden treasure of great jewels. The Queen’s Necklace, another of Dumas’ masterpieces, centers its intrigue around a necklace fraudulently secured, upon which hangs the evidence of Marie Antoinette’s fidelity. Or one thinks of a marauding foreigner, plucking the great emerald from the eye socket of an Orient god—then followed, as in Dunsany’s grisly play A Night at an Inn, by the great stone god itself, come to crush the desecrator and regain its vision.

The Black Prince’s Ruby

The historical stories tell fascinating tales of changes of ownership, as the gems endure across the dying centuries. In the state crown of Britain, guarded in the Tower of London, is a stone called the Black Prince’s ruby. It belonged, when first we hear of it, in 1367, to the King of Granada. Don Pedro, King of Castille, slew him and took the gem. But Edward III of England, the monarch who established the Order of the Garter, had sent Don Pedro some 5,000 men; in thanks for these services, the triumphant Spaniard sent the ruby to Edward’s son, the Black Prince. The ruby was pierced at the top, as though it had, back in its unknown past, been part of a fabulous necklace of an Orient potentate; today, the hole is filled with a small ruby set in gold. The Black Prince, dying before his father, left the stone to his son, who became King Richard II in 1377 and was deposed by Henry IV in 1399 and probably murdered in the very Tower where the ruby now rests. Henry V, to whom it came in his turn, wore the stone at the Battle of Agincourt, where against great odds he defeated the French. After that, it was deemed safer to leave the gem in London; there it became part of the crown jewels. But the crown jewels were scattered by the Puritans in 1642, after Cromwell became Lord Protector. With the Restoration, the Black Prince’s ruby was returned to the crown and has remained unharmed since—save that modern methods of examination have revealed that it is not a ruby at all, only a “balas ruby,” that is, a spinel.

Other Precious Stones

The Stuart sapphire, a great oval an inch and a half by an inch with a hole near the top, can be removed from the royal crown and used as a pendant. This sapphire, after James II was deposed by the Bloodless Revolution of 1688, was carried away from England by the Young Pretender, who—when he grew older and more sage—bequeathed the sapphire, along with other Stuart relics, to George III of England. Since then, it has rested quietly in the crown.

Other precious stones have had their historic moments or movements. Catherine the Great of Russia sent thousands of workers into the Ural mines to hunt for amethysts. Some of Napoleon’s gifts to the Empress Josephine were of emeralds and pearls. The American Museum of Natural History holds among its treasures a great star sapphire weighing 563 carats.

The Crystal Palace

Almost impatiently, however, when great gems are discussed, everyone turns from the other precious stones to talk of diamonds. At the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the pride of Prince Albert in 1851, stones of all sorts were on view. The collection of gems from India, the great subcontinent that was soon to change the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland into an Empire, was stupendous. Queen Victoria noted in her diary: “The girdle of nineteen emeralds is beautiful, all set round with diamonds and fringed with pearls. The rubies are even more wonderful and one is the biggest in the world ... I shall certainly make them Crown Jewels.” Among the pieces exhibited by the lapidaries of Calcutta were strange creations never seen in the western world before: gowries (“blackamoors’ teeth”), golden gothas, ferozahs, a gallobund set with diamonds, and other wonders that have since fallen out of the dictionary. There were also educational exhibits, new and world-shaking inventions like Nasmyth’s steam-propelled engine, the Folkestone express locomotive, and McCormack’s reaping machine from America. But the gaping crowd passed by all these prizes to gather and stare before the diamonds.

The Diamonds

There were diamonds for which there should have been automation to count the value. The great collection of Henry Thomas Hope and his son was displayed, all the glory of their Hope chest, including the mysterious blue stone that came to be called the Hope diamond. There on white velvet lay the great Black Diamond of Bahia, weighing 350 carats, so hard that no one had been able to shape it with facets. And there, not far from a replica of the ship that had just brought it from India, was shown for the first time in England what the catalogue called “the great diamond of Runjeet Singh called the Mountain of Light or the Koh-in-noor.” This is what the millions came to see. (They were disappointed by the sight, for the diamond had been poorly cut and did not reveal all its brilliance.) The Kohinoor lay on a velvet cushion in an iron bird cage on an iron pedestal. When the doors of the Crystal Palace closed each night, wheels began to turn, and the bird cage descended into the pedestal. Safe from all the itching fingers of international thiefdom, the Kohinoor rested in its cage.

The Kohinoor

Mountain of light! The Kohinoor. First worn in the crown, perhaps, of a great ruler in India five thousand years ago. The Koh-i-nur, or Mountain of Light, was next heard of as a great companion to the Darya-i-Nor, the Sea of Light, in the scabbard of Afrasiab around 3,000 B.C. Such are the fabulous stones of ancient times, which Tennyson called

We are told that the great diamond weighed 700 carats; but, when its modern career began, it had been severed and weighed only 186 carats. In 1304 A.D. the stone was in the family of the Rajah of Malwa in India from whence most of the early diamonds had come. In the early sixteenth century, it was seized as a trophy of war by Beber, first of the Mogul emperors. This long and mighty line, including Shah Jehan who built the Taj Mahal for the jewel of his harem, preserved the great diamond. Jehan set it as one of the eyes of his Peacock Throne. Through the long years of the Mogul Empire, the legend grew that he who owns this diamond rules the world. But all dynasties fall and in 1739 Mohammed Shah, Mogul of Delhi, was conquered by Nadir Shah of Persia. Although the defeated Mogul managed to keep possession of his diamond he could not keep control of his harem. In a group of women there is bound to be one who curries favor with the champion, and one of Mohammed Shah’s harem whispered to the Persian king that the diamond lay hidden in her master’s turban. The etiquette of the day gave the shrewd monarch his opening. The treaty of peace having been signed, the Persian invited the Mogul to dinner and there, admiring his guest’s turban, suggested that they exchange. It was impossible to refuse. In his room, unwinding the silken yards, Nadir Shah saw the great diamond. It lay on the floor, an enormous cone-shaped gem, and he exclaimed “Mountain of Light!”—Koh-i-nur!—thus giving the stone its name.

The legendary power of the stone declined, for it changed hands more times than history records. Nadir Shah was murdered by one of his bodyguards, whose most ingenious tortures could not wring the whereabouts of the diamond from the dead king’s son. It passed on through two generations, until Shah Suja was forced to flee for asylum to the court of Runjit Sing, the Lion of the Punjab, at Lahore (now part of Pakistan). The price of Suja’s safety was the delivery of the Kohinoor to Runjit Sing. And here it was in 1849, when the East India Company and the British took control. As partial indemnity for the damages of the Sikh wars, the Company took the stone, presenting it to Queen Victoria the next year at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Founding of the East India Company by Queen Elizabeth I.

After its exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Queen Victoria decided to have the Kohinoor recut to improve its sparkle. She decided on brilliant faceting. A four-horse-power steam engine was set up in the workshop of the crown jewelers to turn the cutting wheel. Prince Albert set the stone on the mill, and the Duke of Wellington started the wheel. Thirty-eight days later, Queen Victoria was given the new-cut diamond, now weighing only 108 carats but superbly sparkling.

As the Queen’s power grew—in 1876 she became the first ruler of the British Empire, on whose flag the sun never set—the legend of the diamond changed: only queens could wear the gem and prosper. From Victoria it went to her daughter-in-law, Queen Alexandria, and it is now part of the treasure of the royal ladies of the British throne.

Tavernier

Jean Baptiste Tavernier was the first of the great travelers who went to the Orient in search of precious stones. On his voyages he saw and described many stones that have since been lost to history. They may have been recut, by illegitimate owners, into smaller stones, or they may be resting in some hidden treasure store.

The Florentine

Among these lost stones is the Florentine, a clear yellow diamond of 137 carats, which Tavernier saw among the treasures of the Duke of Tuscany in 1657. Legends say that Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was wearing the stone in 1476, when he fell in battle. Picked up by a peasant as an attractive pebble, the stone was sold for a florin; after various adventures it fell into the hands of the Medici. Later, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany married Maria Theresa of Austria, the Florentine became part of the Austrian crown jewels. It went into exile, after World War I, with the imperial family, and half a hundred rumors since have set it in as many hands.

The Great Mogul

Tavernier was probably the only European who ever saw the Great Mogul. It was shown him by Aurangzeb, sixth Mogul Emperor of Hindustani, who had usurped the throne in 1658 and imprisoned his father, the great Shah Jehan. Tavernier said it weighed 280 carats and resembled half an egg sliced through the middle. He was told it had weighed 787 carats in the rough, but had been so badly cut that the jeweler, instead of being paid, had forfeited all his fortune. (Such were the risks conscientious jewelers ran!) When the Persians sacked Delhi in 1739, the Great Mogul may have been among their loot. It probably still adorns a beauty in Iran—unless it turned up in the western world as the Orloff Diamond.

The Orloff

Similar in shape to the Great Mogul but weighing (one can hardly say “only”) 199 carats, the Orloff was among the more than 2,500 diamonds owned by Catherine the Great, ruler of all the Russias. One story says the gem was stolen by a French grenadier from the eye socket of a Hindu idol and hidden in a self-inflicted leg wound. Such accounts recur in tales of many jewels. Another story says that it is one of the stones resulting from the cleavage of the great rough diamond that also produced the Kohinoor.

At any rate, it was purchased in Holland in 1774 by the Russian Count Gregory Orloff for 400,000 rubles ($450,000). The Count had been a favorite of Catherine’s; she had made him a prince and the commander-in-chief of her armies. The Court did not mind—or could not help—the number of Catherine’s lovers; but she seemed on the verge of actually marrying the Count. Her entourage therefore set their wits to work, and Orloff fell from favor. For Catherine’s name day, when others at Court presented the customary bouquets, Orloff gave her the diamond. His family’s fortune had been pledged for it, but it failed to re-open Catherine’s arms to him. She never wore the diamond but had it mounted in her sceptre, right under the double eagle. Under that symbol of imperial power, it presumably rests in the Kremlin today. A more prosaic version of the Count’s enterprise states that he assured himself of heart balm by selling the diamond to Catherine for £90,000 plus a £4,000 life annuity.

The Shah of Persia

Another diamond reported by Tavernier and now reposing in the Kremlin is an 88-carat bar-shaped stone of finest quality. It has a tiny furrow cut in it, presumably to secure the cord by which Tavernier, in 1665, saw it suspended in front of the Mogul throne. It also has engraved on it three names and dates. The first name is that of an Indian prince, Bourhan-Nizam Shah II; the date, the year 1000 in the Mohammedan count, the western 1591. The second engraving, in the western year 1651, sets this gem as another among the treasures of the great Mogul Shah Jehan. The third date is western 1824; the owner, the Shah of Persia.

The Persians possessed the jewel until 1889, when a Teheran mob slew the Russian ambassador, the thirty-four-year-old playwright Griboyedov. As a sign of their regret, the Persian royal house sent the Shah Diamond to Russia, where it has remained.

The Great Table

Another stone that Tavernier was the only European to look upon is the Great Table Diamond, sometimes called the White Tavernier. This 242-carat stone is described by the French traveler: “When at Golconda in 1642, I was shown this stone, and it is the largest diamond I have ever seen in India in the hands of merchants. The owner allowed me to make a model of it in lead, which I sent to Surat to two of my friends, telling them of its beauty and the price, namely, 500,000 rupees. I received an order from them, that if it was clean and of fine water, I should offer 400,000 rupees; but it was impossible to purchase it at that price.” The asking price was about $280,000, for want of which the Great Table has totally disappeared.

The table cut—which was virtually discontinued after 1520, when the rose cut grew popular—sliced the gem into a flat slab, sometimes so thin that the diamond was used as a “portrait stone,” set over a miniature painting.

The Blue Tavernier

One diamond that Tavernier brought back from his travels was a blue diamond, roughly heart-shaped, of 112 carats. He sold it in 1668 to Louis XIV of France. It was recut as a slightly pointed drop, being reduced in the process to 68 carats. Louis XV set the diamond in his Order of the Golden Fleece. It was also worn by Louis XVI but was among the treasures of the royal house that disappeared at the beginning of the French Revolution in the great crown jewel robbery. Of these, only the Regent and the Sancy were recovered.

The fate of the Blue Tavernier is in doubt. One story runs that the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece were smuggled to England, where later this diamond was recut. A one-carat blue diamond, last heard of in London, is supposed to have come from the tip. A second stone is a blue drop diamond that came into the possession of the Duke of Brunswick. The third and largest cut is the Hope Diamond.

The Hope

Without any guarantee of this past history, Henry Thomas Hope in 1836 bought a superb blue diamond of 44 carats. Blue diamonds are exceedingly rare; the nearest in weight to the Hope Diamond are the Brunswick diamond, mentioned just above, of almost 14 carats, and a 35-carat stone, the Wittlesbach, exhibited in London in 1930.

The Hope Diamond was willed by Lady Hope, in 1887, to her daughter’s son on condition that he adopt the family name. He became Lord Francis Pelham Clinton Hope. In 1894 he married the American actress May Yohe who wore the diamond when she sang in the music halls. It is said to have been part of the “stage jewelry” listed among her belongings when her trunks were held for a lodging debt, but it was returned to the Hope family.

In 1908 the gem was bought for $400,000 by Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey. With the breath of revolution on his neck, the Sultan three years later sent it to Paris to be sold. It became part of the famed collection of Mrs. Edward B. McLean, whose gems dazzled Washington, D. C., for almost forty years. After her death, it was bought in 1949 by Harry Winston, noted diamond merchant of New York.

The Jehan Akbar Shah

This diamond deserves distinction as the second great eye of the Peacock Throne of the Mogul Emperors. It was engraved with the names of Shah Akbar and his grandson, Shah Jehan. It weighed 116 carats. After Shah Jehan was deposed by his son in 1666, the stone disappeared. Precisely two hundred years later it was shown in Constantinople as the Shepherd stone. Recognized by the inscriptions, the diamond was bought by an English merchant. In London, it was recut to 71 carats, losing the inscriptions and sold to the Gaekwar of Baroda.

The Cullinan

The largest diamond ever discovered was found in 1905 in the Premier Mine in South Africa, which had been opened by Sir Thomas Cullinan. The rough stone, weighing 3,106 carats, about one and a third pounds, was bought by the Transvaal Government and presented to King Edward VII of England, in 1907, on his sixty-sixth birthday.

The Cullinan was sent to Amsterdam to be cut. There, after months of study, the expert set the cleaving blade on the diamond and tapped it with a heavy rod. The blade broke. On the second try, the expert fainted. He recovered to find the great diamond split precisely as planned. Out of the great Cullinan came nine major gems and ninety-six smaller brilliants. The greatest of the cuttings, called the Great Star of Africa, weighs 530 carats, and is the largest cut diamond in the world. It adorns the sceptre of the British Empire. The other large stones are also part of the British Crown jewels.

The Excelsior

Mention should be made of the Excelsior, a diamond of 995 carats, found in the Orange Free State in 1893 and, until the discovery of the Cullinan, the largest diamond known. The Excelsior was noticed by accident, seen by a native in a shovelful of gravel he was pitching onto a truck.

The stone was cut in 1903 by the same firm, Asscher of Amsterdam, that later cut the Cullinan; but the cutting is unique in that all the resulting stones—twenty-one gems—are either pear-shaped or marquise.

The Regent

The Regent Diamond, like the Blue Tavernier, was stolen from the French royal treasures at the brink of the Revolution, but unlike the others this gem was recovered and restored to its place in France. A superb stone, the diamond weighed 410 carats in 1701, when it was picked up by a slave in the Partial Mines of India. The slave, following storied precedent, gashed his leg and hid the stone in the bandage. He limped his way to the seacoast. There he offered to share the proceeds of the sale of the stone with a sea captain; but unfortunately the slave did not survive the rigors of the ocean voyage, and the ship’s arrival in Bombay found the captain in sole possession of the stone.

From an Indian merchant it was bought by Thomas Pitt, then Governor of Madras, and sent to England to be cut. Political enemies bruited abroad that he had obtained the stone by questionable means; though they never got to the core of the matter, he became known as Diamond Pitt. He sold the diamond in 1717 to the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France, for about $500,000, which kept the family in affluence through several generations. But at any moment in the political careers of the great English statesman, William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the Younger—major figures in the struggles with the American colonies and the American Revolution—there might be dragged out, as a political target, that family skeleton about the coming of the Pitt Diamond to England.

The Pitt Diamond, now renamed the Regent, was cut into a cushion-shaped brilliant of 140 carats, a superbly sparkling specimen of a great gem deftly handled. Marie Antoinette used it to adorn a large black velvet hat she favored, borrowing it from the crown of Louis XV. But it remained with the royal jewels until they were all stolen in 1792.

Found in a Paris garret, the diamond came to Napoleon, who pawned it to secure funds for his triumphant campaigns. After using the stone in this fashion several times, he had it set into the hilt of his ceremonial coronation sword.

When Napoleon went into exile, the stone accompanied his second wife, Marie Louise, to the Chateau of Blois. Her father, the Emperor of Austria, returned it to Louis XVIII. The diamond shuttled between the Napoleons and the Louis until France became a republic. When the French crown jewels were auctioned in 1886, the Regent Diamond was withheld from the sale.

By lying quietly behind a stone panel of a chateau in Chambord, the Regent escaped capture by the Germans in the Second World War. It is now on display in the Louvre where, like the Kohinoor cage at the Crystal Palace, its case sinks nightly into a burglar-proof vault.

The Sancy

The Sancy and the Regent are the only jewels of the French royal treasure that were recovered after the robbery of 1792. Legend has confused the early story of the Sancy stone with that of the Florentine Diamond, but it has had enough vicissitudes to make an historic tale. A superb and fiery stone of 54 carats, one of the first ever cut in symmetrical facets, the diamond was bought in Constantinople, about 1570, by the French Ambassador to Turkey, the Seigneur de Sancy. Back at the court of his king, vicious and vain Henry III, Sancy was constrained to lend the diamond to his monarch, who set it in the cap he wore to cover his baldness.

The shrewd successor to the throne, Henry IV, made Sancy the Minister of Finance, and the again borrowed diamond was used as security to raise troops. The stone was sent to the moneylenders in Metz; but the messenger was waylaid and slain. The diamond vanished. Sure of the man’s loyalty, Sancy recovered the body and had an autopsy performed; and from the stomach of the faithful servant the diamond was recovered.

Wary of further loans, Sancy sold the diamond to Queen Elizabeth I of England. It stayed with the royal house until Charles I was beheaded. The Earl of Worcester, to whom Charles’ widow had entrusted it, returned it when the monarchy was restored. In the second Revolution in 1688, James II took it to France. There, after a time, it passed from the royal exile to his diamond-hungry host, Louis XIV. Again the gem stayed with a royal house until the turbulence of revolution; the Sancy, along with the other royal treasures, was stolen in the tumultuous days of 1792.

For almost forty years the Sancy’s story is hidden. In 1828 it turned up in hands that sold it to Prince Demidoff of Russia, husband of the Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon Bonaparte. Many of this Princess’ jewels were designed by Louis François Cartier, whose creations she made popular at the court of the Empress Eugénie, thus giving impetus to the young House of Cartier.

But at this point the story of the Sancy Diamond takes a double path. Sold to the Maharajah of Patiala and set in platinum, it remains part of the treasure of the land from which it first came. So goes the story. But either the Sancy diamond or a mysterious twin is worn by the former Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, now Lady Astor.

What further wars such gems may survive, and what owners they may be cherished by, in the coming centuries, future historians may tell.

Out of the Earth

From the dull earth comes the bright sparkle of the diamond. Early prospectors, as gold-hunters panned the streams, sifted the surface gravel. When likely spots were located, men and machines began to dig. At Kimberly, the mine shaft is more than 3500 feet deep. One diamond may be secured for each 21 million parts of ore; but gem diamonds in the larger sizes are so much more rare than industrials or gems in the smaller sizes that more than 250 tons must be mined to yield a stone that can be cut and polished into a one-carat gem.

A purchaser, at the end of this arduous searching, must see to the four C’s of diamond value. First the weight in carats. Although more labor goes into the preparing of five one-carat gems than of one five-carat gem, the single large stone is worth more than the sum of the five. Comparatively few rough diamonds can be effectively cut into large-carat stones.

Second, the clarity. A flawless gem, by official standard, is one in which no imperfection is visible to the trained eye under tenth-power magnification. Such a stone can be shaped to fullest brilliance.

Third, the color. Rarest is the pure colorless diamond, together with the flawless blue. Slightly yellowish tints are in disfavor, but red again is extremely rare and highly valued. Of all, the colorless, or white, diamond, is most likely to be richly responsive to light.

Fourth, the cut. Not merely how well does the particular cut—brilliant, marquise, rose, and the rest—become the diamond; but, whatever the cutting, how well was it made? That is the pertinent question. And perhaps there should be added to this the matter of the setting—the degree to which the finished jewel sets off, displays and enhances the precious stone.

When these qualities are properly present, when a choice gem in a fine jewel adorns a fair lady, then one may truly say, in every sense, that all beholders are privileged to look upon beauty in jewels.