Her Grace Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (March 31, 1920 – September 24, 2014), née Deborah Freeman-Mitford, was the last of the noted Mitford sisters. She married Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire in 1941.
The formidable Duchess turning a pensive gaze towards the viewer, wears the diamond diadem together with a quantity of the Devonshire pearls, and the Zenobia costume from Worth, Paris, which Louise, 8th Duchess of Devonshire, wore at the famous Devonshire Diamond Jubilee House Ball in 1897. The occasion was a costume party held at Chatsworth to celebrate the eightieth-birthdays of the 11th Duke and Duchess.
The tiara rests on a band of pairs of stylized buds between collet-set diamonds, surmounted by a sequence of palmettes outlined by diamond borders linked at the base to lotus flowers graduated toward the back, totalling approximately 1900 diamonds.
An article written by Duchess Deborah in the Sunday Telegraph of March 17, 2002,described her own behaviour when wearing so much glitter:
“Before the last war, tiaras were worn by married women at all the grand balls in London. Even at a big dance in the 1960s it was not uncommon for men to wear tail-coats and the women their jewels.
I remember going to a such an entertainment on my own wearing, with unwonted confidence, the “big” tiara (the Devonshires have two).
It must have looked rather odd, because my home-made dress of cotton broderie anglaise was definitely not up to it. At the end of the evening I went out to look for a taxi. It never occurred to me that it might not be a good idea to stand alone in the street long after midnight with a load of diamonds round my neck and nineteen hundred more glittering above my head.
But then, even though Helen, Duchess of Northumberland, once had her tiara snatched off her head as she was leaving her house in Eaton Square, we did not think of being mugged (the word did not exist).
My mother-in-law, Mary Devonshire, who was Mistress of the Robes to The Queen from 1953 till 1967, used to fetch the jewels from the bank stowed in a Marks & Spencer carrier bag.
My grandmother-in-law, Evelyn, Duchess of Devonshire, was Mistress of the Robes to Queen Mary for 43 years from 1910. Together she and Queen Mary weathered long hours of tiara-ed evenings.
After one particularly lengthy engagement, Granny was heard to say “the Queen has been complaining about the weight of her tiara . . . the Queen doesn’t know what a heavy tiara is”.
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