‘King of jewellers': Cartier's enduring relationship with the Royal family

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14-04-2025

On 13 Oct 1940, a month after Germany had begun the Blitz on British cities, Princess Elizabeth made her first public speech. Aged 14, she shared a message of comfort and hope with the children of Britain and the Commonwealth on the BBC's Children's Hour. The radio broadcast was intended as a morale boost to the thousands who had been evacuated away from their families to the countryside and even overseas.
'My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those you love most of all,' she said from the drawing room at Windsor Castle, with 10-year-old Princess Margaret by her side.
Shortly after the broadcast, which was deemed a great success by all – including the Princesses' father, King George VI – Alfred Foreman, assistant managing director of Cartier London, sent the King a letter asking if the firm might mark 'the exceedingly happy occasion' by giving Princess Elizabeth a 'little gold and diamond microphone bracelet charm' it had made in the form of a radio mic. This tiny jewel may pale in comparison with the glittering tiaras and historic diamonds that characterise Cartier's enduring relationship with the Royal family, yet it indicates the intimacy that existed between jeweller and client. That relationship threads its way through the forthcoming Cartier exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
Cartier's records and the Royal Archives at Windsor reveal how royal patronage enabled the French jeweller to weave itself into the fabric of British society and, perhaps even more importantly, spread its reputation around the world.
'The Royal family acts as a kind of beacon in our history,' says Pierre Rainero, Cartier's director of image, style and heritage. 'We have held a royal warrant since 1904.'
Indeed, in May last year King Charles III became the fifth consecutive crowned British monarch to grant Cartier a royal warrant. 'We feel immensely privileged to have been granted one at this early stage of the King's reign,' says Laurent Feniou, managing director of Cartier UK and the warrant's grantee, just as the Cartier brothers were in 1904.
Cartier was founded in Paris in 1847, and King Edward VII became a client when he was still Prince of Wales, naming it the 'jeweller of kings and king of jewellers'. In 1902, the year of his coronation, the Maison opened a boutique in London, its first outside the French capital, to meet the orders flooding in from prominent British families for the occasion.
Pierre Cartier, the second of the three grandsons of founder Louis-François, established a boutique at 4 New Burlington Street in Mayfair, premises that were shared with the couturier Charles Frederick Worth, making it a one-stop shop for all courtly dress needs. At the coronation that August, Winifred, the statuesque, swan-necked Duchess of Portland who was one of Queen Alexandra's four canopy bearers, wore a brand-new Cartier tiara, complete with the spectacular Portland diamond.
Within a decade of Edward VII granting Cartier its first royal warrant, in 1904, the Maison had amassed warrants from seven royal and imperial courts around the world, including Russia, Thailand and Spain. Edward and Alexandra (who granted Cartier her own warrant in 1905) were not only highly visible as the crowned heads of the world's greatest global power, but also extremely stylish. Their elegance and glamour set the standard for what to wear at the dizzying array of lavish balls and events that made up Edwardian court life.
In 1904 Queen Alexandra commissioned a collier résille from Cartier, a diaphanous web of diamonds and platinum. This magnificent piece was created in her preferred dog-collar style, which concealed a childhood scar on her neck, and which she made fashionable around the world. The necklace, which originally had a removable fringe of cabochon rubies and emeralds, was later adopted by her daughter-in-law, Queen Mary, who wore it often.
As well as jewels, Alexandra possessed a menagerie of carved animals, including, from the Maison, a pair of penguins in agate and diamonds, and a gold-legged flamingo in rose quartz. In 1911 she chose a Cartier carriage clock in labradorite and enamel to give to her son, George V, to mark his ascension to the throne. Inscribed on the back was 'For my darling Georgie on his coronation June 22 1911, from his loving Mother dear. May God lead and protect you'.
Art deco, which owes much of its popularity to Cartier's visionary designs, was all the rage by the time the future George VI, then Duke of York, married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, in April 1923. Early on in their marriage, he gave her a set of five Cartier line bracelets, two set with diamonds, one in emerald and diamond, one in sapphire and diamond, and one in ruby and diamond.
The young Duchess of York wore them all together on one arm, or as a bandeau worn low on the forehead, using a special mount from Cartier. She later gave the bracelets to her eldest daughter, who wore them throughout her reign in different combinations as bracelets, as does Queen Camilla today.
This generational loyalty is testament, says Rainero, to the pieces' sentimental significance as well as to the timelessness of Cartier's designs. 'When a new generation of a royal family wears a piece, it demonstrates the continuity of what that family means to a country,' he says.
Henry 'Chips' Channon's garrulous diaries provide a vivid glimpse into London high society during the interwar years. The American-born, London-based diarist and MP embedded himself among 'the grand and the chic of the earth'. He befriended the Bright Young Things, especially Edward, Prince of Wales, and Prince George, Duke of Kent.
In April 1923 Channon recorded sending a small Cartier lapis and diamond clock to the Duke and Duchess of York as a wedding present. His entries are also peppered with visits to the firm's New Bond Street boutique, Cartier London's location since 1909, with Jacques, the youngest of the Cartier brothers, at the helm. While there, Channon saw fellow society figures such as Lady Granard, who he described as being so heavily bedecked in diamonds that 'my eyes got bloodshot looking at her jewels', and the Prince of Wales as he shopped for presents for his lovers Freda Dudley Ward and later, Wallis Simpson.
In 1934 the Duke of Kent was praised by The Guardian for displaying 'the most modern taste in his choice of both the ring and the setting', with his choice of a Cartier square emerald-cut Kashmir sapphire engagement ring to give the strikingly chic Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. 'His selection will undoubtedly make sapphires the most popular ring for engagements this year,' it continued.
Two years later the new King Edward VIII also proposed with a Cartier ring. He presented Wallis Simpson with a 19.77-carat emerald ring on 27 Oct 1936, inscribed with the words 'We are ours now'. He abdicated just two months later, choosing his bride over his kingdom.
At their wedding, at the Château de Candé in France the following June, the only rings the couple wore were by Cartier. In pictures captured by Cecil Beaton, and alongside Wallis's engagement ring, the now Duke of Windsor sported a pair of Cartier Trinity rings on his little finger.
The Depression in America and political unrest in France didn't affect Cartier London, which reached its highest point both creatively and commercially in the 1930s. In Britain lavish jewels, including tiaras, were still very much in demand during the social season.
In 1937 George VI's coronation was proclaimed by Tatler 'the crowning jewel of the most brilliant season that London could remember'. That year Cartier London sold approximately 30 tiaras.
The Cartier Indian Tiara, which is now owned by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, was bought by Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, just before the coronation. Made in 1923 for Lady Granard, the tiara originally featured pear-cut aquamarines and sapphires, which were replaced with large diamonds for its new owner.
An unusual tiara of rare black Australian opals was commissioned by Mary Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington. Now in a private collection, it was worn as a necklace by the Marchioness (by then the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) at the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
George VI himself bought two tiaras from Cartier for his wife between 1936 and 1938. A diamond one in the 'halo' style has since been worn by three more generations – Princess Margaret, the Princess Royal, and the Princess of Wales, on her wedding day in April 2011.
The other was the 1937 Pineflower tiara in diamonds and aquamarines, a gemstone that was particularly fashionable in London during this period. It now belongs to the Princess Royal. Aquamarines are also the centre of a 1935 brooch given by George VI while he was still Duke of York to his wife, which will be exhibited for the first time.
The fact that the Royal family return time and again to their Cartier jewels is testament, says Rainero, to the enduring relationship between the houses of Windsor and Cartier. 'A royal warrant today has exactly the same meaning as it had when we first received one,' he says. 'It means trust and it means a reward for the quality of our service and the quality of our creations. It is also a stimulus to keep pushing towards the same heights of expectation that such an honour bestows.'
Perhaps the most insightful exhibit on show, which reveals much about the trust that can exist between a family jeweller and any of its clients, is a selection of drawings by the long-time Cartier London designer Frederick Mew, which were given to the V&A by his family in 2009. Among them are designs for a 1953 commission Cartier received from the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II for a brooch centring on the exceptional 23.6-carat pink Williamson Diamond, which she had received as a wedding gift in 1947 from John Thoburn Williamson, a staunch Canadian monarchist who had discovered a diamond mine in Tanganyika (Tanzania today) in 1940.
Mew's proposals for variations on a flower brooch display not only Cartier's creativity, but also its responsiveness to, and understanding of, the desires of its clients. The late Queen wore what became known as the Williamson Diamond brooch on significant family occasions during her reign, including the weddings of Princes Charles and Edward. Queen Camilla wears it today: a homage to the timeless design, the beauty of the piece, and jewellery's role in representing continuity generation by generation.
Rachel Garrahan is a curator of the Cartier exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London from 12 April
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