Lady Granville's Beetle Parure

It's not a bug - it's a feature!

Tiara and necklace set with iridescent weevil shells. In between the weevils are tiny gold rods with a black enamel bead on the bottom and a lotus motif on the top. They are in a leather-covered case lined with red silk.

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Imagine - you're an ambassador and you have just concluded a trade treaty with the Foreign Secretary of Britain. How best to mark this momentous occasion? By giving the Foreign Secretary's wife ... bugs. Weevils, to be exact. Lamprocyphus augustus, from South America. Just a quick note: the term beetle is often used to describe this parure and, while beetles and weevils are both part of the insect order Coleoptera, they are from different families in the order.

side view of Lamprocyphus augustus, a greenish iridescent weevil found in South America

Hectonichus, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In a couple of ways, this wasn't so unusual. First of all, the treaty was with Portugal and, per the British Museum website,

"... granted exclusive navigation rights on the Congo River to Britain in exchange for British guarantees of Portugal’s control over the mouth of the Congo River, thereby closing off the vast interior of Central Africa to trade from other European states and giving Portugal a corridor between Mozambique and Angola."

This treaty caused big feelings all around. In Britain, there was the sense that this treaty wasn't looking out for British interests and other European powers were just generally pissed off about it. The gift of the shiny bugs, which were native to South America, where Portugal had some history, can be seen as an expression of Portugese gratitude, a little something something for doing the country a solid, especially in the face of international blowback. As usual, I'm here for the sparkly (or, in this case, shiny) jewels and not the weeds of history but you can read the notes from the British Museum that I'll link below or search for "Anglo-Portugal Treaty of 1884" if you are interested in learning more about the political nitty gritty.

close up view of a portion of the tiara, showing the weevil shells interspersed with the lotus motifs

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Another way in which this gift wasn't entirely out of left-field was that using scarabs or jewel beetles in jewelry was a popular late 19th-century thing. Iridescent beetle wings were even used to decorate clothing! Weevils were ... definitely a choice!

white dress from the 1800s decorated with iridescent beetles. There is a line of beetles down the front of the bodice, outlining the cuffs, neckline, shoulder areas. The skirt of the dress is covered in large and small motifs, some looking like foliage, all created from beetles.

Source

The ambassador had wanted to gift the Foreign Secretary's wife actual jewellery but the secretary was afraid that would smack of bribery so instead he accepted just the weevils. He commissioned Phillips Brothers of London to create a parure and they used the 46 weevil carapaces to make a tiara, necklace and earrings. They were set in gold and, bowing to the Victorian Egyptmania of the time, interspersed with lotus motifs. According to an article from J. B. Hawkins Antiques,

"The famous firm of Phillips of Cockspur Street established in 1839 were already well known for producing jewellery, in the neo-classical, Egyptian and neo-Renaissance styles and this parure is heavily influenced by antiquity. The form of the necklace, for example, is similar to the Classical fringe necklaces being excavated from archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. The tiara, which is decorated with stylised lotus motifs, is redolent of ancient Egyptian treasures. "
Earrings made from weevil shells. They are suspended from a fitting with one lotus blossom at top, two underneath with one facing left and one facing right and to each side of the weevil shell is a small gold rod with a black enamel bead at the bottom.

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

There is no record of what Lady Granville thought of her new jewelry suite. There is a comment on the British Museum's site that the shell's iridescence would have shone beautifully in candlelight. Also, I think you could have safely gone into a social situation without worrying that someone else was also wearing a beetle parure!

Just a final note - when looking up information on this I have read several people's comments wondering how the weevils are staying, um, fresh. These pieces aren't the actual bug, they are only the hard shell.

image of a white rabbit popping out of his rabbit hole, looking around, and going back in. His rabbit hole is surrounded by grass and some carrots in the ground.

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