According to legend, the diamond was discovered by an enslaved man in the Kollur Mine near the Krishna River in India and was concealed by the slave in a leg wound, which he suffered while fleeing the 1687 siege of Golconda by the Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb.

It is of an excellent christaline water without any fowles, only att{sic} one end in the flat part there is one or two little flaws which will come out in cutting, they lying on the surface of the Stone, the price they ask for it is prodigious being two hundred thousand pag.

[5][6] He dispatched the stone to London hidden in the heel of his son Robert's shoe[7] aboard the East Indiaman Loyal Cooke, which left Madras on 9 October 1702.

After many attempts to sell it to various members of European royalty, including Louis XIV of France, it was purchased for the French Crown by the French Regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, in 1717 for £135,000 (equivalent to £25,940,000 in 2023),[11] at the urging of his close friend and famed memoirist Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon.

[11] In 1792, during the revolutionary furore in Paris, "Le Régent", or the regent diamond, was stolen along with other crown jewels of France, but was later recovered.

The diamond was used as security or collateral on several occasions by the Directoire and later the Consulat to finance the military expenses: 1797-1798 it was pledged to the Berlin Entrepreneur Sigmund Otto Joseph von Treskow and 1798–1801 to the Dutch Banker Vandenberg in Amsterdam.

Today, mounted in a Greek diadem designed for Empress Eugenie, it remains in the French Royal Treasury at the Louvre.