The Mystery of the Jardine Star Brooch

In his 1955 memoir Silver and Gold, the royal dressmaker and couturier Sir Norman Hartnell used the phrase “dress diplomacy” to describe the particular art of sartorial messaging deployed by royal women when out in public. Consider the late Queen Elizabeth II wearing chartreuse to stand out in a crowd, or Princess Anne signaling a paradoxical lesson in royal frugality by rewearing a 42-year-old dress.

The humble brooch, if a cluster of precious stones can indeed be called “humble,” is one such diplomatic tool. Whether it’s Kate Middleton wearing a diamond maple leaf brooch in Canada or Queen Camilla heaving under the Cartier brooch known as the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes Brooch while deplaning in Maryland in April, a royal brooch is never happenstance.

“I think the late queen, she knew more about her jewelry collection than anyone else,” says Joanna Hardy, fine jewelry specialist and regular on BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. “She would remember every brooch that she was given, when and where she was given it…. She never, ever wore jewelry without there being a significant reason, from a political point of view.”

Which makes one particular brooch favored by Queen Elizabeth II, and now by Queen Camilla, all the more intriguing: the Jardine Star Brooch. Leslie Field writes in The Queen’s Jewels that a late-Victorian sunburst of diamonds, presumably the Jardine Star Brooch, was bequeathed to the queen in 1981 by a woman identified mysteriously only as Lady Jardine; it has since been the subject of frequent press speculation.

Queen Elizabeth II wore the star brooch on a number of notable occasions, including her Diamond Jubilee weekend in 2012 and when she met with President Joe Biden in 2021. Queen Camilla also favors the brooch; she wore it to Royal Ascot in 2024 and 2025, and most recently to the Founder’s Day ceremony at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London this June, when she pinned it to another one of her stalwarts, a dress by Anna Valentine. But despite these regular airings, the origin of the mysterious Jardine Star Brooch has remained tantalizingly unexplained for decades.

Its provenance seems less of a mystery to the Jardines, an ancient Scottish Border family with a recorded history going back to the 12th century and a clan motto of “Beware, I am present,” which they should consider printing on T-shirts for toddlers.

“As long as I can remember, my family have talked about the Jardine Star Brooch and were aware of the fact that our beloved late queen wore it publicly on several occasions,” says the current Lady Jardine, Gemma, who is married to Sir William Jardine, the 13th baronet and 24th chief of Clan Jardine.

Lady Gemma tells VF that the brooch may have once belonged to Lady Eda Jardine of Applegarth, a Scottish aristocrat, wife of the 9th baronet, Sir William Jardine, and “something of a lively character and quite a woman in her day,” she says.

Another relative of Lady Eda’s, Tim Wright, also links the brooch to her. Wright shared in a 2021 letter to The Telegraph that Eda was born into the Younger’s brewing family. She was a keen sportswoman and race car driver in the 1920s and 1930s, and was once described by a family member as “someone who would have commanded an armored division with distinction.” She won the Monte Carlo Ladies Cup in the large cars division in 1931, racing a Lancia Lambda (the cup is still displayed in Lady Gemma’s home).

The Jardines are a clan of “fighters, writers, adventurers, emigrants, lawyers, rogues, sportsmen, and strong women,” as well as “fluctuating fortunes,” says Lady Gemma. One branch of the Jardine Clan—distinct from the aristocratic line of Lady Eda and Lady Gemma’s husbands—amassed vast wealth and notoriety as merchant shippers and “architects” of the First Opium War in the 19th century.

When Lady Eda died childless in 1960 at age 93, having survived her husband by 45 years, she funded a Scottish charitable trust (still operating today as the Lady Eda Jardine Trust) which supports “arts, conservation, community regeneration, and social welfare,” says Lady Gemma. This was much to the chagrin of her nephew, who hoped to inherit her money, her descendant Wright (one of the charity’s current trustees) wrote in the 2021 Telegraph letter after Queen Elizabeth II wore the star brooch to a meeting with President Biden at Windsor Castle.

“I have heard that the star itself may have originally been part of a necklace given to Eda by her father, but I couldn’t say that with any certainty,” says Lady Gemma. The jewelry expert Joanna Hardy says it likely originally formed part of a tiara. “I see a lot of these brooches…these starbursts,” says Hardy. “A lot were later broken up and made into brooches, because then they were distributed throughout the family.”

But why the brooch was left to the queen (and why, according to Field, it took until 1981 to get to her) “remains a mystery, even within the family, and one that Sir William and I would dearly love to solve,” says Lady Gemma.

Hardy points to the example of Margaret Greville, favorite of Queen Mary, who left her extensive jewelry collection to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in 1942. “If you’ve got impressive jewelry, at least you know it’s going to be A, looked after, and B, worn,” says Hardy.

Not to mention, it guarantees the family name remains linked with the royal family for as long as the pieces are worn. “It is very special to see Queen Camilla wearing [the brooch] now,” says Lady Gemma. “There is something rather lovely about knowing that a piece of jewelry that has such a personal connection to our family has become part of the royal family’s story too.”