Queen Camilla wore King Charles’s new Family Order on Tuesday night during the Japanese state banquet at Buckingham Palace, with the badge featuring several modernising changes to its traditional look.
Family Orders are badges that are traditionally worn at formal evening occasions by female members of the Royal Family and are personally bestowed by the sovereign as a sign of the importance of the wearer within the royal household.
George IV started the tradition of presenting Family Orders – miniature portraits of the sovereign set in diamonds suspended from a ribbon – to female members of the family more than 200 years ago.
Charles’s Family Order debut comes nearly two years after the monarch acceded to the throne following the death of his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth.
His new badge, which was worn by the Queen, features a diamond-encased miniature portrait of the monarch topped with a tiny gold and enamel Tudor crown.
It was suspended on a pale blue silk bow on her left shoulder for the glittering event in the Buckingham Palace ballroom.
However, the King seems to have modernised some of the elements of his Family Order while keeping to the traditional appearance.
His miniature portrait is painted on a synthetic material called polymin, rather than on ivory as was the tradition, and the diamonds are spare ones – existing loose jewels from the Royal Collection rather than newly acquired.
Polymin is a translucent treated plastic sheet similar in texture to ivorine, which is a synthetic ivory made from cellulose nitrate.
The diamonds are brilliant-cut and have a total weight of 10.41 carats – and the Order, designed by the Crown Jeweller Mark Appleby, was crafted in 18-carat white and yellow gold which was already in royal possession.
King Charles personally selected the pale blue colour of the ribbon which is based on the bow on the Family Order of his great-grandfather King George V.
Sovereigns presenting jewelled portraits of themselves have tended to use different-coloured ribbons from other monarchs.
The painting of the King – depicting the monarch wearing the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, the Sash of the Royal Victorian Order, the Garter Star and Thistle Star and the Garter Collar and Neck Orders of the Order of the Bath and the Royal Victorian Order – was by portrait miniaturist Elizabeth Meek.
The King will have privately presented the Order to his “darling wife” and Queen consort, Camilla – whom he praised in his first televised address as monarch for her “steadfast devotion to duty on which I have come to rely so much”.
More than one Family Order can be worn at the same time and Camilla was also wearing the late Queen Elizabeth II’s which is mounted on a chartreuse yellow ribbon, below that of the King’s.
The Queen was given Elizabeth’s Family Order by her mother-in-law on her 60th birthday in 2007.