Jewels are beautiful, precious things to be sure—but they take on whole new meaning when there are stories attached to them. It applies just as much to the personal as to the historical. A sentimental gift, or something inherited carries with it quite naturally an elevated, emotional value. The same is true of historical jewels, pieces that are figuratively engraved, set and marked with stories of decades or even centuries past. That is certainly the case with an incredible 18th century diamond necklace, the star lot of Sotheby’s upcoming Royal & Noble Jewels auction set to be held on 13 November in Geneva.
The auction features 175 lots of jewellery with marked provenances, coming from the collections of—as its name suggests—royalty and nobility. There are imperial Fabergé pieces, a good number of lots that can be traced to the Bulgarian monarchy, and more still that have never been seen or sold on the market before. But it is this 18th century diamond necklace, formerly in the collection of the Marquess of Anglesey, that is the most tantalising.
In design, it is surprisingly modern for a jewel that was most likely created in the decade before the French Revolution, between 1778 and 1788, over two centuries ago. Nearly 500 diamonds weighing approximately 300 carats are set into three rivière rows that connect two tassel ends for a negligé-style necklace. Though over two centuries old at this point, the necklace moves and wears as supply as fabric. It can be worn draped or knotted around the neck, and over the shoulder as an epaulette. And if its age inspires some old-world style, it can also be worn across a corset or bodice as a stomacher.
The diamonds on the necklace are set in the à jour style, a method of creating open-worked backs to allow more light to enter the gems—innovative for its time. The diamonds themselves are in the old cushion- and round-cuts of the period, and—because there was only one major source of quality diamonds at the time—likely to be stones of the first water from the famed Golconda mines in India.
These are impressive enough even in modern considerations, but the fact is that a jewel with as many diamonds and as fine work as this could only have been been the privilege of royalty or nobility. Yet not many jewels from the 18th century survive. Because of how rare diamonds were at the time, a woman might have to re-set her diamonds if she wanted a new jewel. Coupled with the fact that pieces were often dismantled to be sold or passed on, makes an intact and impressively-crafted piece of jewellery like this even more significant.
Its most notable owner and wearer is perhaps Marjorie Paget, the Marchioness of Anglesey. A glamorous high society lady of the early 2oth century, the Marchioness was considered one of the best-dressed of her time, landing frequently on the pages of Vogue. In 1937 Sir Cecil Beaton—a famed society photographer who contributed to Vogue—photographed the Marchioness wearing the diamond necklace on the occasion of the coronation of King George VI. That wouldn’t be the only coronation the necklace would grace: it was also worn at Queen Elizabeth II’s in 1953.
But what’s a story without a twist? With this necklace comes a potential and intriguing link to Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution. The queen and the revolution are remembered now as a revolt of the suffering masses against an uncaring monarchy. Like most things, the revolt didn’t happen overnight. Resentment had been building for a time, but it was a scandal about a diamond necklace that dethroned Marie Antoinette in the court of public opinion.
The story goes like this. The French royal jewellers Boehmer & Bassenge had created a stupendously expensive diamond necklace, containing nearly 650 diamonds weighing a total of almost 2,800 carats. The kind of thing, in short, that could only feasibly be proposed to the extremely wealthy. Ergo: royalty. It was offered for sale to Marie Antoinette, who declined to acquire it as the expense was too great. A measure of desperation, then, for the jewellers with a masterpiece on their hands and no one to pay for it.
In the court of King Louis XVI, in the meantime, were two characters: the self-proclaimed countess Jeanne de la Motte, and the Cardinal de Rohan, a bishop and ambassador who was in Marie Antoinette’s bad books. The latter, eager to reinstate his position at court, sought the help of Jeanne de la Motte, who pretended she was in Marie Antoinette’s inner circle.
What ensued was a scam in which Jeanne de la Motte forged letters (and even staged a nighttime meeting with the help of a hired actor) by ‘Marie Antoinette’ to convince the Cardinal that the Queen was falling in love with him. This version of ‘Marie Antoinette’ wrote to the Cardinal that she wished to acquire the necklace—but clandestinely through him, so as not to arouse public discontent.
So the Cardinal de Rohan went to Boehmer & Bessange, who were more than glad to have secured a buyer. And, of course, by the time the scam was discovered in 1785, the necklace had been delivered to Jeanne de la Motte, picked apart and dismantled, and sold in London. A public scandal ensued, and Marie Antoinette, though innocent in the affair, was forever branded as a wastrel queen. Vive la révolution—what follows is history as we know it.
Now comes the plausible connection. While by no means a whole part of that original, notorious jewel that precipitated the French Revolution, there is speculation now that the diamonds in the Anglesey negligé had come from it. Henry “Chips” Channon, a British politician and social diarist, once referred to it after seeing them worn by Marjorie Paget.
“At least two ropes of it,” he claimed of the diamond tassel necklace, once belonged to that nearly mythical jewel of revolution. He wrote: “the rest, according to history, was broken up before the French Revolution but I believe the Anglesey tassels, which Marjorie sometimes wears, are a part of it.”
Whether that is fact, however, remains a mystery. In jewellery, provenance can be a tricky thing: notable pieces are acquired or sold discreetly, and can disappear from public view for years before it is seen again. This diamond necklace, for instance, remained in the Paget family until the 1970s when it was, per Sotheby’s, “acquired for an important Asian collection”. Its future, and to whom it will go next is as much a tantalising thought as its past.
