King Charles and Queen Camilla led the Royal Procession at Royal Ascot on Tuesday, arriving in the first carriage alongside the Duke and Duchess of Wellington for the opening day of one of the most anticipated events on the royal calendar. For the occasion, Queen Camilla wore the Cullinan V, a heart-shaped diamond brooch with a history stretching back more than a century. It’s also the same one she pinned on the first day of Ascot last year, suggesting the makings of a new royal tradition.
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King Charles and Queen Camilla in the Royal Procession on Tuesday.
According to the Royal Collection Trust, the Cullinan V is one of nine principal stones cut from the Cullinan Diamond, the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found. Unearthed in South Africa in 1905 and named after Thomas Cullinan, the chairman of the mining company that discovered it, the stone weighed 3,106 carats in its uncut state. It was sent to Amsterdam, where three craftsmen worked 14 hours a day for eight months to produce the nine large stones, numbered I through IX, along with 97 smaller brilliants. The South African government purchased the principal stones and presented them to Queen Mary in 1910. After King George V had Cullinan I and II set into the Sovereign’s Sceptre and the Imperial State Crown, the remaining stones were passed down to Queen Elizabeth in 1953.
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Queen Elizabeth wearing the Cullinan V to a cricket match in 1958.
Queen Elizabeth also wore the brooch frequently over the decades, including at Princess Eugenie’s wedding to Jack Brooksbank in 2018 and at London Fashion Week that same year.
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Queen Camilla wearing the brooch at a royal garden party in 2024.
The Cullinan V brooch is versatile: it can be pinned as a brooch or affixed to a tiara. Queen Camilla most famously incorporated it into her coronation crown in place of the controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond. Camilla has since worn it at a Buckingham Palace garden party in 2024 and most recently at a reception on the White House lawn during a state visit to the United States in April.
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Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at @rk.passport.