Lady Edwina Mountbatten: Jewels, Scandal, and the Fall of an Empire – HT
There is a jewel in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that stops people cold. It sits behind glass, a sinuous platinum vine hung with carved emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Leaves and berries of pure saturated color shimmering as though alive. It is known as the Cartier Tutti Frutti Mountbatten Bandeau, made in 1928 for one of the most talked about women in the world.
Her name was Edwina Mountbatten. And if you want to understand the woman who wore that jewel, you need to go back, not to a glittering ballroom, but to a boarding school in Eastbourne, where a girl of 12 sat alone and wrote a desperate letter to her grandfather. “Please take me away, dear grandpa, if you love me at all.
” The gilded cage, a lonely heiress and her first rebellion. Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley was born on the 28th of November, 1901, into a world that glittered from the outside and was hollow at its core. Her father was a conservative MP more interested in politics than daughters. Her mother was the only child of Sir Ernest Cassel, a German-born financier who had bankrolled kings across Europe and become the closest confidant of King Edward VII.
When Edwina was nine, her mother died of tuberculosis, leaving a wound that would never fully close. Her father remarried a woman barely older than Edwina herself, who regarded her stepdaughters as inconvenience and packed them off to boarding school. Edwina described those years in two words, sheer hell. That letter to her grandfather changed everything.
Sir Ernest Cassel brought Edwina to live with him at Brook House, his vast marble mansion on Park Lane, so lavish that one maid was employed full-time simply to tend to the flower vases. At Brook House, Edwina was transformed. She became the cherished hostess of one of the most powerful men in Britain, learning to move through a drawing room full of princes and American heiresses as though she owned it because increasingly she did.
Brook House was also her first education in jewels. Growing up among Cassel’s Fabergé animals, gold boxes, and antique silver, she absorbed the language of luxury. She learned how color, weight, and craftsmanship could say things that words could not. In September 1921, Cassel died, leaving his vast fortune to his only grandchild.
Overnight, Edwina Ashley became what the newspapers called the richest heiress in Britain. She was 19 years old. It was through their mutual connections with the Vanderbilts that Edwina met Lord Louis, Dickie Mountbatten, tall, handsome, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, related to almost every throne in Europe.
What he lacked was money. What Edwina lacked was the kind of ancient rank that money alone could never buy. The match was understood by everyone as exactly what it was, a fusion of new wealth and old blood. They married on the 18th of July 1922 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. The Prince of Wales stood as best man.
King George V attended. Their 6-month honeymoon circled the globe. Spanish monarchs, Manhattan magnates, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood. It was on this tour that Edwina realized she was not merely a rich man’s hostess. She was a star. Back in London, she dressed the part. Slim and dark-haired with eyes that tilted upward into something between mischief and challenge.
She adopted the new fashions with absolute conviction. Shorter skirts, bias-cut gowns, bobbed hair. Fashion journalists listed her among the best-dressed women in the world, and her jewels evolved to match, away from heavy Victorian diamonds toward the Art Deco language of sharp lines, vivid color, and movement.
In November 1928, she walked into Cartier London and bought a jewel unlike anything she had owned before. The Tutti Frutti Mountbatten Bandeau, a platinum headband hung with leaves and berries carved from Indian emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, cost 900 pounds, reportedly bought to celebrate the birth of her younger daughter, Pamela.
It could be worn as a low bandeau across a bobbed forehead or dismantled into two bracelets. In London ballrooms and on Mediterranean terraces, it became her signature. Daring, colorful, modern, and secretly made of Indian stones carved in a tradition far older than Cartier’s platinum mounts suggested.
But behind the jewel, behind the photographs, there was a woman who was profoundly, chronically restless. One friend observed it plainly. For Edwina, there was always something missing. She didn’t know what it was or where it was, but she was determined to find it. The Open Marriage, Ginks, Scandal, and the Price of Freedom.
On the surface, the Mountbatten marriage looked like the stuff of fairy tale. Broadlands filled with guests. Winston Churchill, Noel Coward, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the Prince of Wales, and Mrs. Simpson. But Dickie’s heart ultimately belonged to the Royal Navy. And when he went back to sea, Edwina was left adrift in London.
She had survived emotional neglect once as a child. She had no intention of enduring it again. The affairs began early. She gathered around her what she privately called her ginks, a rotating cast of admirers, sportsmen, aristocrats, artists, American businessmen. The situation became, in London’s tightest social circles, an open secret.
One story from those years has become legendary. A flustered maid greeted Edwina on her return from shopping with the words, “Mr. Gray is in the drawing room. Mr. Sandford is in the library. Mr. Ted Phillips is in the boudoir. Señor Portago is in the anteroom. And I simply don’t know what to do with Mr.
Molyneux.” Edwina is said to have been entirely unruffled. When Dickie discovered the first affair, he was devastated. But devastation eventually gave way to pragmatism. They were too famous to divorce. They had children. They had duties. And in their own complicated way, they loved each other.
Not with consuming passion, but with a deep, resilient friendship neither was willing to sacrifice. They arrived at what their daughter Pamela later called a modus vivendi. Separate beds, separate romantic lives, public discretion, and remarkable tolerance for each other’s choices. Mountbatten himself, by later historical accounts, was no passive party.
Biographer Andrew Lownie pointed to evidence of his own affairs with both men and women. As Dickie later summed it up with rueful humor, they had spent most of their marriage getting into other people’s beds. During this chapter, the tutti frutti bracelets, the bandeau dismantled, reborn as two vivid stacks of colored stones, appear on Edwina’s wrists in photographs from casinos on the Côte d’Azur and parties in Manhattan.
They are the armor and advertisement of a woman who has decided that if the world insists on watching her, it will watch her on her own terms. Among all her liaisons, one erupted into open scandal and exposed something ugly at the heart of the England she moved through so effortlessly. Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson was a West Indian cabaret pianist, extraordinarily talented, polished, a favorite of the Prince of Wales, and a fixture in the smartest clubs of 1930s London.
He was also a black man in a society with very rigid ideas about who could move where and with whom. Edwina embarked on a passionate affair she made little effort to conceal, reportedly draping a chiffon scarf around his neck and kissing him publicly at a party. She showered him with extravagant Cartier gifts, including, according to later accounts, a bejeweled intimate object commissioned from Cartier.
In 1932, the Sunday paper The People published a barely disguised item about a highly connected society woman in compromising circumstances with a colored man. The palace pressured Edwina to sue. She did and won. Officially exonerated, she returned to her drawing rooms, her position intact. But the scandal completed the destruction of Hutch’s career.
His bookings dried up, his star faded, and he never fully recovered. He the price that Edwina, insulated by wealth and royal connections, did not. It is one of the harder things to reckon with in her story. That the same woman who would later walk into cholera camps in genuine service of the powerless operated in her private life from a position of near invulnerable privilege.
Her daughters, Patricia and Pamela, grew up in extraordinary material luxury. Silver train sets, exotic pets, nurseries staffed by nannies, but often without a mother who was present. Edwina adored her girls in bursts, but used travel as an escape that took her away for months. Pamela has written about stretches when their mother was abroad with companions, once depositing the children in a continental hotel and losing track of which one she had used.
Bunny Phillips, one of Edwina’s longer-term lovers, became so constant a figure that the girls called him uncle and thought of him as a second father. For all her rebellion against the neglect of her own childhood, Edwina sometimes reproduced versions of it in her daughters’ lives. One jewel stands apart in these middle years, the Mountbatten tiara.
For the 1937 coronation of King George VI at Westminster Abbey, Edwina needed a tiara of genuine grandeur. The piece she acquired had begun life at Chaumet in Paris. An Indian style design of circular cut diamonds in scrolling platinum trefoils, made for a Belgian ambassadress and later sold second-hand through Cartier London.
Its true origin was not confirmed until the 21st century, when archival research for the Chaumet in Majesty exhibition traced the original commission. It later sold at Sotheby’s in 2002 for nearly 150,000 pounds. In Westminster Abbey, none of that history mattered. What the congregation saw was Lady Mountbatten, diamonds catching the candlelight, every inch the grand dame of the British establishment.
Not the flapper heiress of the 1920s. Not the socialite of the gossip columns. A woman at 35 who had learned to wear ceremony as confidently as she wore fashion. The war was two years away. And the most important chapter of her life had not yet begun. India, Nehru, and the jewels of late love.
In March 1947, Louis Mountbatten was appointed the last Viceroy of India, tasked with dismantling the jewel in the British Crown and handing it back to its own people. When he and Edwina landed in Delhi, they stepped into a subcontinent on the edge of catastrophe. As Vicereine, Edwina presided over state dinners and receptions lit by a thousand lanterns in the viceregal gardens.
But she had spent the war years building genuine expertise, rising to superintendent in chief of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, touring bomb sites and hospitals, arguing for supplies. Now, she applied that same energy to a crisis on a scale she had never imagined. When partition came in August 1947, the consequences were apocalyptic.
Millions of people were on the move, leaving everything behind. Trains arrived at their destinations filled with the dead. A million people would be killed in 10 weeks. Edwina went in. She moved through refugee camps and makeshift nursing stations, sometimes under military escort, sometimes not, organizing cholera vaccination drives, pushing for clean water, using whatever remained of British authority to open doors slammed shut by two centuries of resentment.
One aide recalled, “She was quite marvelous. She was almost better with women than with men, and that’s saying a lot.” In these years, the tutti frutti bandeau and bracelets stayed in their cases. What appeared at her throat was simple, pearls, a brooch, the insignia of her orders. The true ornaments of her vice-regal years were the St.
John Cross on her pocket and the stack of papers in her hands. But India also gave her something she had been searching for in drawing rooms and casinos and Mayfair boudoirs for almost her entire adult life. Jawaharlal Nehru was 57, a widower. His entire emotional life sublimated into the cause of Indian independence.
He was bookish, idealistic, elegant, and beneath the public figure of India’s first Prime Minister, profoundly lonely. From the first meetings in Delhi’s formal rooms, something happened between them that observers noticed and struggled to name, an intensity that had nothing to do with the ceremonies around them.
The relationship deepened into what their own letters, read decades later by Pamela, make unmistakably clear was a profound love. Pamela Hicks, in her memoir Daughter of Empire, concluded that while it was intensely emotional, it was likely not physically consummated, that it existed in a space beyond easy labels, a meeting of minds, of spirits, of two complex people who recognized in each other something they had not found elsewhere.
Nehru wrote, “You have left me a feeling of peace and happiness.” She replied, “I hated seeing you drive away this morning.” Mountbatten accepted it, sitting with them on the terrace of the Viceroy’s house, his presence a deliberate cover for a connection that could not be public. He understood, perhaps, that what they shared did not diminish his wife’s loyalty to him, even if it was beyond his reach to give her the same thing.
For Edwina, this love was the antithesis of her ginks. Nehru did not need her money. He was entirely indifferent to her jewels. He valued her mind, her courage, her capacity for compassion. She, who had spent decades looking for something she could not name, seems finally to have found it in the least likely man, in the most turbulent of moments.
After 1948, the connection changed form, but did not end. Edwina visited India nearly every year. Letters crossed continents, privately and carefully. And it is in these final years that the last of her great jewels come into focus. In the 1950s, she acquired a necklace entirely different in character from the Jazz Age bandeau, cataloged at the 2021 Sotheby’s sale as an extensive articulated wreath of carved emerald leaves.
A single deep green, its botanical form suggesting not excitement, but something older, growth, continuity, patience. It sold for over 107,000 pounds. Where the tutti-frutti bandeau was riot and color and daring youth, the emerald wreath was the adornment of a woman who had known both splendor and grief, and had arrived, at last, at a version of herself she recognized.
At the same Sotheby’s sale appeared a pair of gold and enamel elephants from Jaipur, their bodies set with gemstones, inscribed simply, Edwina from Dickie, a gift from Lord Mountbatten on their 24th wedding anniversary. They sold for £34,020, 14 times their estimate. In a union that had included an open arrangement, multiple affairs, public scandal, and private grief, Dickie had still chosen to mark their anniversary with two small golden elephants made in the country that had changed both their lives, inscribed with
the most private version of his name. They had, in their strange and unconventional way, made it work. The sea burial and the letters. In February 1960, Edwina died in her sleep in North Borneo on a St. John Ambulance tour, aged 58. She was found surrounded by Nehru’s letters. In a life that had contained so many diamonds and emeralds and carved Indian gems, it was a stack of paper covered in the handwriting of a man who governed one of the world’s largest nations that she had kept closest to her at the
end. She received a sea burial from a Royal Navy destroyer in the English Channel. As flowers were cast upon the gray water, two wreaths went overboard. One from Mountbatten, one a wreath of marigolds from Nehru, carried by an Indian naval vessel that had crossed specifically to be present. The two men who had shared Edwina’s life cast their flowers simultaneously onto the same grave.
In the Bollinger jewelry gallery at the Faience A, the tutti frutti bandeau still stops visitors cold. The color is startling. Carved emerald leaves, ruby berries, sapphire clusters in a diamond platinum vine, shimmering as though the stones still carry warmth from the wrist and brow they once adorned.
What the label does not tell you is this. The woman who wore it was 9 years old when her mother died and no one came. 12 when she wrote in desperation to her grandfather. The richest heiress in Britain at 19, married to royalty at 20, famous and searching for 30 more years until she found in a partitioned country and in the letters of a lonely widower the thing that none of the diamonds could supply.
Edwina Mountbatten’s jewels survive as the most eloquent record of who she was and when. The tutti frutti bandeau speaks of the jazz age rebel. The Chaumet tiara of the establishment grand dame. The emerald wreath of a woman who had known splendor and grief in equal measure. The Jaipur elephants of a love that outlasted the empire that brought them together.
They are beautiful objects. But the woman who wore them was more interesting than any of them. She remains, more than 60 years after that sea burial, one of the most extraordinary women the British gilded age produced. Flawed, fearless, perpetually searching and in the end magnificent. Edwina Mountbatten lived a life that defies a single verdict and perhaps that is exactly what makes her so unforgettable.
I would love to know what you think. Did you find yourself admiring her courage or troubled by the price others paid for her freedom? Do you think she finally found what she was searching for? In Nehru? In India? In service? And if you could ask her one question, what would it be? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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