Monday 29 March 2004

The Case of the Disappearing Jewels, Part II

Rumors vs. Reality
 

When a thief climbed into an upstairs window at Ednam Lodge in 1946 and climbed back out with a box containing a king’s ransom of precious jewels, he did more than just make history; he created an enduring mystery that would enflame old rumors surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and inspire new ones. In the first part of this two-part column, I addressed the details of the robbery and the prime suspects with a focus on the discrepancies between the historical accounts and the recent reports, which are based on newly available information. I will now evaluate the primary rumors surrounding the case.  

Although there have been many theories and hypotheses surrounding the stolen Windsor gems, they are all based on two core rumors. First, that the royal family orchestrated the robbery in an attempt to recover jewels rightfully belonging to them but in the Duchess of Windsor’s possession. Second, that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor faked the robbery to raise cash on the insurance claim.  

Alexandra’s Emeralds

Even before King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in December 1936 to marry the American divorc�e Wallis Simpson, gossip was rampant that he had given her jewels belonging to the royal family – jewels intended for the future queen of England. To be sure, the future Duchess of Windsor had amassed a large collection of jewels, all courtesy of her royal lover, and was proudly wearing them at a wide array of social functions on the eve of the abdication. Keen-eyed socialites zoned in on her conspicuous display – of emeralds in particular – and began circulating rumors that the emeralds were part of a collection the king had inherited from his grandmother, Queen Alexandra.  

The rumor goes that when Princess Alexandra of Denmark arrived in England in 1863, she carried with her a valuable collection of uncut emeralds, given to her as a gift from the Danish people. According to the scandalmongers, the then Prince of Wales had inherited these emeralds from Alexandra for the purpose of passing them down to his future wife, the next queen of England. Speculation over the story came to a head just before the abdication when, it was claimed, Wallis’ divorce attorney was sent to retrieve the emeralds from her in Cannes. As with all good rumors, this one provided only enough information to tantalize by omitting a conclusive result of the mission, allowing the story to simmer for ten years before finally boiling over after the robbery. Even Lady Dudley, the duke and duchess’s hostess at Ednam Lodge, was later quoted as saying that the stolen jewelry box had contained “HRH’s (the duke’s) fantastic collection of Faberg� boxes and a great many uncut emeralds which I believe belonged to Queen Alexandra.”  

Shortly after the robbery, the story once again captured the public imagination and gave rise to the theory that the royal family had orchestrated the robbery in an attempt to recover the emeralds once and for all.  With little regard to the evidence of the case and with no confirmation that the emeralds had ever even existed, the theory was generally considered to have merit and plagued the duke and duchess throughout their lives. To the modern observer, however, the holes in this theory are glaring. 

To begin with, Lady Dudley’s claim that the stolen jewelry box contained “uncut emeralds” that had belonged to Queen Alexandra is ridiculous, as it is highly unlikely that, if they even existed, such important emeralds would have remained uncut for 80 years, especially in the hands of the flashy Duchess of Windsor. Even if the stones had been cut and put into settings, they don’t appear to have been in her jewelry box. The official list of stolen jewels, which was provided to police and the insurance company, includes only one emerald – a ring consisting of a relatively small 7.81-carat square cut stone. Historical accounts of the robbery place a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the list contained the word ‘etcetera,’ and imply that this was a tactic by the duke and duchess to obscure their possession of the emeralds. Perhaps, but it is more likely that ‘etcetera’ was a reference to the mates of the some 18 unmatched earrings recovered on the Sunningdale golf course the following day.  

The smaller details out of the way, we can address one of the foundations of the original rumor – that the duke had inherited the emeralds from his grandmother. In fact, Queen Alexandra died intestate in 1925, and her three remaining children – Queen Maud of Norway, Princess Victoria of Wales and King George V (along with Queen Mary) – met together at Sandringham to divide all of her belongings in equal portions among them. Since many of the jewels Alexandra had worn in her lifetime had been considered held in trust for future queens of England, only her truly private collection of jewels remained. If there had been a large cache of important emeralds among her remaining jewels, it’s doubtful that Queen Mary – who had a mania for jewels – would have let go of them so readily, especially to a son she considered irresponsible. Some of the most important emeralds in the present queen’s collection – the Cambridge emeralds and Delhi Durbar emeralds – were acquired by Queen Mary and carefully passed down to her granddaughter.  

Whatever was passed to the then Prince of Wales from Alexandra’s belongings came to him via his parents and would have been a matter of public record, at least among the royal family. In fact, it was no secret that Alexandra’s collection of Faberg� boxes, which was stored in the duchess’s jewelry box and had been abandoned during the robbery on one of the windowsills at Ednam Lodge, had been passed down to him after her death.  

But if these explanations leave any doubt in the mind, Leslie Field solidly debunks the myth of “Alexandra’s emeralds” and offers a conclusive end to the story in “The Queen’s Jewels: The Personal Collection of Elizabeth II.”  Field, whose extensive research into the queen’s collection was helped along by Her Majesty’s Household, confirmed that the precise records of the wedding gifts given to the Victorian Prince and Princess of Wales did not include “a great many uncut emeralds.” There is no doubt that Alexandra received many precious gems upon her marriage, emeralds included, but they were all set into various pieces of jewelry, and there is no record of anything like Lady Dudley and others had suggested.  

Of course, there is one loose end… Recent reports state that one of the items recovered on the golf course was a string of pearls worth �5,000 that had belonged to Queen Alexandra, but none of the historical accounts list or mention this item, which I find unusual given the rumors. Although I have not investigated this claim, I do know that the most significant pearl necklace in the duchess’ collection is the one she wore to the duke’s funeral, which had been a gift – an inheritance to be precise – to the duchess via the duke from Queen Mary. If the pearls found on the golf course did once belong to Alexandra and the royal family was trying to steal back jewels that belonged to them, why would they abandon such a valuable necklace? Either they didn’t care about it or they weren’t behind the robbery. 

The bottom line is if there were no jewels belonging to the royal family in the duke and duchess’ possession, it’s safe to assume that the royal family did not orchestrate the robbery. In reality, the sources of many of the jewels the duke gave to the duchess, both loose and set, were the private family heirlooms of the duke and his family (i.e. true personal property) and gifts given to the future king while he was traveling the Empire as Prince of Wales. Specifically, many of these were gifts from his tour of India in 1921 and 1922.  By tradition, these gifts were considered private property and were his to do with as he chose. 

Regardless, all their lives, the duke and duchess had to deny that they possessed any jewels belonging to the royal family. The duke denied that he ever had any jewels from the royal family, while the duchess denied that she had ever possessed or worn any such jewels.  When questioned, even Buckingham Palace stated that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor owned no royal jewels. 

Insurance Fraud?

The theory that has more meat to it maintains that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor themselves were behind the robbery, with the aim of collecting the insurance payout. Certainly, there is little doubt that the robbery was an inside job. The thief knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going. As if on cue, he entered Ednam Lodge via an open window sometime after the bell rang calling all of the staff and servants, including the detective guarding the house, to tea. Once inside, he walked through a corridor and straight into the duchess’s bedroom where the jewel box was located inside a locked trunk. None of the dogs belonging to either the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or the Earl and Countess of Dudley ever barked, suggesting that the culprit was familiar to the animals. When the robbery was discovered, it was confirmed that nothing else had been taken and there was no sign of searches either elsewhere in the duchess’s room or in any of the nearby rooms, including Lady Dudley’s bedroom, where some of her jewels were visibly placed on the dressing table.  

Not surprisingly, these simple facts have led many to suspect the duke and duchess, whose actions following the robbery did little to dispel the belief. Most news reports at the time estimated the stolen jewelry was worth �500,000 (about �13 million in today’s terms), but the duke, reacting to the rumors that he had instigated the robbery himself, told journalists that the loss was worth only �20,000. A strange assertion considering that the jewels were insured for �400,000 and among the stolen items was a brand new brooch that alone was likely worth more than �20,000. Delivered by Cartier the morning of the robbery, the brooch was a jeweled bird of paradise with a large sapphire forming the bird’s breast. It was created using gems already in the duke and duchess’ collection, making one wonder why, if they did instigate the robbery, they would include a brand new piece of jewelry among the collection. Later, the duke was to say that he “knew” that Cartier shouldn’t have delivered the jewel when they did. It’s too bad he didn’t know that all of the jewels should have been in a safer place. 

One of the items that escaped the robbery was the duchess’ Cartier brooch made of rubies and sapphires forming the couple’s intertwined initials, ‘W’ and ‘E’, which she was wearing the day of the robbery. The couple had been using “WE” in a variety of ways in their correspondence since early in their relationship and it became an important symbol of their union. The deep personal meaning of the jewel, combined with the fact that the duke had given it to Wallis around the time of the abdication crisis, made it of great importance to them both. It was either extremely lucky or had been previously arranged that it was on her lapel and not in the jewelry case at Ednam Lodge.  

Further inflaming this rumor is the fact that, as Suzy Menkes notes in “The Windsor Style,” a year after the robbery the duke and duchess provided Cartier with a large quantity of loose stones, including amethysts, emeralds, diamonds, sapphires and rubies, which were incorporated into new pieces for the duchess. Then, in the 1960s, the duke and duchess provided Cartier with five “cloudy deep green” emeralds and a large quantity of diamonds that were used to create one of her fabulous necklaces. This constant availability of gems might seem to indicate that the couple had a surprisingly large collection of jewels after the robbery. In all actuality, the insurance settlement was extremely generous, paying for all the lost pieces to be replaced and reinsuring the new collection for �800,000 – giving the couple plenty of cash to buy new jewels.  

We’ve already established that the duke owned a great many valuable jewels in his own right and he and the duchess were constantly setting and resetting her jewels to keep up with fashion.  Not even her engagement ring was sacred. She had the nearly 20 carat ring – half of a huge emerald originally belonging to the Grand Mogul – reset by Cartier in 1958. But the argument could go either way in this case, after all, the stolen jewels were never recovered. Is it possible that the duke and duchess kept the stolen jewels, breaking them down into loose stones for resetting, then collected the insurance money and used the combined haul as the new foundation of the Duchess of Windsor’s fabulous jewel collection? That, my friends, is what I would like to know and is a question that I one day hope to answer.

Until next week,

- Tori Van Orden