Jewels and the woman: The romance, magic and art of feminine adornment

by Marianne Ostier

PART FIVE

The Story of
Rings and Famous Stones

CHAPTER 16
Romance of Rings

The Universal Ring

Of all the jewels of history, most widespread in time and space, and upon the human body is the ring. From the crown of the head to the tip of the toes, the circular band has been an adornment and a symbol. In the ears, around the neck, tight about the biceps, loose about the wrist, across the chest, around the waist, in iron fetters at the ankle in days of old to indicate the slave or in the self-imposed “slave anklet” of thin gold today: men and women have worn rings of grass, of wood, of bone, of metal. But especially upon the fingers there have been all sorts of rings, for many purposes.

The Magic Ring

One of the earliest values found in rings was doubtless magic. This worked in many ways, according to the beliefs of different times and peoples. Simply to put a ring on another person’s finger was to bind that person to you—an early magical belief which has endured as a symbol in the engagement and the wedding ring. To protect the wearer against the powers of evil in the world, rings are adorned with potent gems, or carved with potent symbols. Turn the emerald in a ring on a poised snake, and the snake was stricken blind, as the nineteenth-century poet Moore remembers in Lalla Rookh:

Blinded like serpents when they gaze

Upon the emerald’s virgin blaze.

The snake itself, being associated with the sybils and other prophets of old and linked with man in earliest Bible story and man’s most fateful hour, is also a most potent and frequent device. It might be carved upon the ring, or the whole ring itself might represent a serpent, eating its own tail—like the worm Ouroboros that winds around the world and keeps it from bursting asunder—or with its head nestling upon its body, watching for the approach of danger. Being itself a lurking danger, the snake obviously was most fit to search out hidden evil. A snake ring of gold with ruby eyes was often on the finger of George IV of England.

Divining Rings

Rings of hieroglyphic symbols, the sphinx, or later cabalistic devices, were used by diviners and seers. Sometimes, to the unwitting eye, the ring seemed an innocent adornment; when a soothsayer wished to make use of a magic formula, a cunningly hinged portion opened to reveal the mystical designs. In the Middle Ages, rings of astrologers and soothsayers multiplied. Rings with signs of the zodiac were used to cast a nativity. The powers of numbers were explored and exploited on rings. The word A B R A X A S, frequent on rings of the time, is said to have drawn its special power from the number force of the letters, which add up to 365 and thus encompass the entire year. Perhaps that is why Leap Year is said to be unlucky for men.

A common design, born no doubt of the early sphinx, was the figure of a fantastic monster compounded of many beasts. Imagination created many of these hybrid and extremely powerful forms. Associated with the A B R A X A S was a creature with the head of a cock, the body of a man with outstretched hands holding a shield and a whip, the legs spread out and becoming serpents with darting fangs. Especially sought for security against shipwreck was a ring engraved with a human head adorned with an elephant’s trunk grasping a trident, symbol of mastery over the sea.

Renaissance Remedy Rings

The Renaissance, resplendent with rings, made many to be used as amulets to bring good fortune, or charms to ward off evil. Cellini made several such for his noble patrons; they seemed, however, not to stem the tide of sudden deaths. Against various vindictive powers special gems were once more utilized, jacinth to bring good fortune to voyagers, sapphires to keep the eyes keen (as some today employ the humbler carrot), garnet to soothe the bite of hornet or wasp.

The common people, even more afflicted by the pains of life, also sought these ringed remedies. The toadstone ring was deemed effective. Several actual stones have since been called by this name—no one knows precisely what it was—but the effective ones were generated by the toad, possibly as nature’s compensation for the creature’s ugliness. The toadstone was credited, as the Oxford Dictionary puts it, “with alexipharmic or therapeutic virtues.” The best known allusion to the toadstone is in Shakespeare’s As You Like it, when the banished Duke in the forest reflects upon his state:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

It must by no means be thought that the toadstone is merely a literary fiction. Queen Elizabeth, on her Progress in 1558, was given a “toade stone set in golde.” Sir Walter Scott, in 1812, called it “sovereign for protecting new-born children and their mothers from the power of the fairies.” Against fairies, perhaps the toadstone worked.

More questionable was the power of a ring against specific diseases, although to the edge of this century country folk in rustic parts, as in back-lying Suffolk, wore special rings that were blessed against cramps.

A more mechanical method of using rings in witchery or divination has been to pitch or spin them, or to suspend them and let them swing, in such a way as to have them indicate Yes or No; or, by falling upon haphazardly arranged letters, spell out a message.

Visibility Rings

Legends of rings that make one invisible are universal. An unusually potent one, we are told in a tale of medieval Europe, was given by the Queen Mother to Otnit, King of Lombardy, when he set out to seek the hand of the Soldan’s daughter. In addition to making him invisible at will, the ring always foiled his detractors by indicating to the owner the right road toward his destination.

A ring set with a carbuncle possessed the opposite property, of making one visible in pitch dark. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus when Martius looks into the deep pit and cries that Bassianus is lying there, his comrades ask how he can see, and he replies:

Upon his bloody finger he doth wear

A precious ring that lightens all the hole,

Which like a taper in some monument

Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks

And shows the rugged entrails of the pit.

Religious Rings

The early magician or medicine man, when he became the priest, did not relinquish his ring. As far back as we find traces of worship, we find religious uses of the ring. Their pious symbolism was perhaps most fully detailed by Pope Innocent III, when on May 29, 1205 he sent to King John of England four golden rings each set with a colored stone, and explained their symbolism in this way: The endless shape of the ring reminds us of eternity, and that we are all journeyers through time to eternity. The number of rings equals the four virtues that comprise constancy of mind: justice, fortitude, prudence, and temperance. The metal signifies wisdom from on high, which is as gold purified by fire. The four stones are an emerald, green emblem of faith; a sapphire, blue emblem of hope; a garnet, red emblem of charity; and a topaz, bright emblem of good works. The four rings, the four stones, the metal, and the shape, make ten aspects: ten is the perfect number, being the unity of nature plus the trinity of God multiplied and fructified by itself.

The religious symbolism of rings has not lapsed. Even today the Pope wears the traditional annulus piscatoris, the Fisherman’s Ring, which shows St. Peter in a boat, casting a net to haul in the faithful from the waters of the world. Clerics of various ranks and orders wear special rings. Nuns wear a ring to signify their symbolic marriage to Jesus.

Less common today, but used throughout Europe for centuries, is the reliquary ring. This band bears a small cabinet, case, compartment, or box, usually elaborately carved and bejeweled, within which was a splinter of the True Cross or the holy relic of a martyred saint.

We shall speak later of the wedding ring, which while a social is also a religious symbol. Annually on Ascension Day the Doge of Venice sets a wedding ring onto a finger of the sea, to denote that the Adriatic is servant to the city just as a wife is to her mate.

Practical Rings

From earliest times, too, rings have been enlisted for more prosaic duties. Signet rings have served romantic ends in history and legend, as well as supplying the king’s or the merchant’s identifying seal. Noblemen slain in battle have oftentimes been identified by their rings, which bore the crests of their noble houses. Until recently every Chinese scholar and mandarin wore a ring, or carried a little ornamented bar of ivory or jade, topped with intaglio symbols that stamped his name. Such stamps are to be seen on many paintings, and at the end of passages of calligraphy.

The practice of sealing envelopes with stamped wax is no longer a widespread western custom, and even red tape has lost its redder seal; hence the signet ring, once most common among men, has been largely replaced by rings bearing the insignia of a high school or college class or a fraternal order.

Among other practical uses of finger rings may be mentioned their use as money by the Gauls and other tribes of northern Europe. Women have had mirrors set in their rings, to give them constant glimpses of beauty—or a chance for quick repair. In eighteenth-century England and later—my grandfather wore one—were rings capped with a little hammer to press the tobacco down in pipes.

And there were rings for fighting. Roman gladiators added iron rings to the power of their fists, sometimes even enlarging these with a bar across the entire back of the hand, held by a leather thong across the palm—predecessors of the infamous “brass knuckles.”

Poison Rings

Even more sinister, though mainly obsolete except in spy stories, is the murderous poison ring. In some such rings, the poison could be ejected through a tiny aperture in a point of the design, as in the lion’s claw of a ring of Cesare Borgia’s. This point would normally be on the side of the ring at the back of the hand, but it would be slipped around to the palm outstretched to shake the hand of the unsuspecting victim. A firm pressure of greeting became at once goodbye.

Another of the Borgias, Pope Alexander VI, would ask the man he destined to death to open a cabinet for him. He gave the man a key ring, and as the bar twisted in the massive lock, a prick injected the poison into the pressing hand.

More frequent than these pressing devices, however, were rings with a secret compartment or concealed receptacle that could be opened, to pour out the poison, so that it might be mixed unnoticed when one was filling a glass of wine for an unwanted guest.

This type of ring was also most useful for emergency suicides. When the great Carthaginian commander Hannibal was captured by the Romans in 183 B.C., he ended his life by biting into the soft metal cap of his ring which was filled with poison. In 1794 the French philosopher Condorcet, arrested in the Revolution, made his exodus from a world in turmoil through the aid of a poison ring. Numerous accounts of international espionage in recent wars make it seem that, as a release from torture and psychological brainwashing, the suicidal use of the poison ring is not outworn. But many a ring, originally constructed to conceal a poison, before it found rest in a museum was used as a conveyor of perfume.

A more humdrum use of the ring has been not to end but to mark the passing hours. The first time-keeping ring was a miniature sundial. As soon as escapements were compact enough, watches were set as the crowns of rings; I have mentioned that two hundred years ago Mme. de Pompadour wore a watch in a gold ring encircled with diamonds.

Honorary Rings

A ring has often been used as a mark, token, or reward of distinction or great service. Originally for valor in battle, these rings are now used to mark distinction in many fields. In Germany for generations, the greatest actor has worn the Ifflandring, which he takes from his hand to bestow upon the performer of the next generation whom he deems his most worthy successor. Another noted ring is the Mozart Ring, awarded to those who meritoriously continue the composer’s tradition. There are today but three wearers of the Mozart Ring: Bruno Walter, Herbert von Karajan, and Carl Boehm.

Posies and Lovers’ Rings

The prettiest rings are those that have been used in courtship. Before the brilliant solitaire, the large diamond that marks the formal engagement, all sorts of posy rings, as they were called, were popular gifts for centuries. An English book of 1624 bears the title “Love’s Garland, or Posies for rings, handkerchiefs, and gloves, and such pretty tokens as lovers send their loves.” This was in the main a collection of little rhyming remarks or pithy sayings, to be engraved on rings, or on the inside of ring bands when the ring itself was decorated with stones in the form of flowers or lovers’ knots. A favorite was the Latin motto Amor vincit omnia, (Love conquers all), which Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales put on a bracelet of the Prioress. But simple English phrases abounded on these rings. “I am yours” is blunt enough to serve. “My love is true To none but you” might make a suspicious maiden (but what shy maid in love would question so?) wonder to how many the donor had already shown love that was false. More to be trusted, perhaps, is the pious soul that sent the motto: “In God and thee My joy shall be.” A wit (or a gambler) might complacently have inscribed “I cannot show The love I O.” A less wary but more learned fellow might proclaim, inside the ring: “Let reason rule affection.” The practice of having rings engraved with such posies was so common that in Shakespeare’s As You Like It the melancholy Jacques taunts Orlando:

“You are full of pretty answers. Have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths’ wives, and conned them out of rings?”

I quote Shakespeare not because he is the most given to such references, but because he is the best known of the many writers in whose works they abound: jewels in jeweled phrases.

In other forms than posies, rings carry the language of love. They may, of course, in engraved letters or letters shaped of stones, give the initials or the name of the beloved. Or letters may record a significant event in the course of the courtship, as when a cryptically boastful Frenchman set a ring with the letters L A C D, which pronounced in French sound “Elle a cédé”—“She has yielded!”

More subtly and more sentimentally such announcements may be made, moments recorded, or feelings expressed, through the initial letters of the gems. Thus a beloved named Adele might be given a ring with stones set in the following order: amethyst, diamond, emerald, lapis lazuli, emerald; the first letters of the names of the stones spell her name. A favorite such token is one arranged so that the initial letters of the stones spell “Regard Love”; hence, these have sometimes been called regard rings. Rings have been used to express sentiment less soft, as well; politically minded Irish, in Revolution times, were wearing rings that spelled Repeal.

For those with the enthusiasm and the funds, almost an entire alphabet of gem stones can be used. Omitting duplicates, one may run along, to spell one’s message, with amber, bloodstone, carnelian, diamond, emerald, fluorite, garnet, hyacinth, indicolite, jasper, kunzite, lapis lazuli, moonstone, nephrite, opal, pearl, quartz, ruby, sapphire, turquoise, variscite, willemite, zircon. This fashion of conveying one’s sentiments has never grown obsolete and is continually renewed.

The Nuptial Ring

When courtship reaches the more definite stage of betrothal, rings are still the order of the day. As early as the second century B. C. the Romans, whose marriages were not love matches but family affairs, gave formal engagement rings. A study of Shakespeare reveals forty-five references to rings and jewels, eleven being of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, the pearl. For example, betrothal rings are exchanged by Troilus and Cressida; and such an exchange builds the sunrise comedy scene at the close of The Merchant of Venice. For friends, the fede (faithful) ring developed, a band of gold representing clasped hands. For lovers, the gimmal or gemmal, the twin ring, was popular; this consisted of two rings intimately intertwined, which ingeniously came apart so that each lover could wear half of the pair.

Climax of the deft pursuit and fond allure, the wedding ring has always been a treasured symbol. An early ecclesiastic told why: “The form of the ring being circular, that is, round and without end, importeth thus, that mutual love and heartfelt affection shall roundly flow from one to the other, as in a circle, continuously and forever.”

Although the wedding ring for a long time was invariably of gold, fashions in recent years have been changing. Our grandmothers were proud to wear a plain wide band. After the First World War, when gold gravitated toward Fort Knox, the bands grew narrower and platinum wedding rings were introduced. The gold itself, instead of a plain band, might be drawn as though the ring were fashioned of strands, or hammered into tiny bars with corners around the circle, in various modernistic patterns. The practice also began of using diamonds in wedding rings; never one large brilliant, outthrust like the happy engagement solitaire, but a row of smaller stones inset, almost flush with the band. Today the plain wide wedding band is circling back into favor, along with the olden practice of putting a ring on the finger not only of the bride but of the groom. It is a mutual compact.

In ancient times, much more elaborate rings were used for the ceremony, sometimes so large that immediately after the wedding they were put aside, replaced by smaller rings, and put on again only at the burial day. Among the Jews the ring might have an adornment in the shape of a tower, and be inscribed with the Hebrew words for Good luck, Mazul-tov.

Less Solemn Marriage Rings

Among the country folk in late medieval times, marriage was sometimes a quickly arranged affair, and rush rings were often used for rushed marriages. The rush ring weddings, at which a “hedge-priest” officiated, were intended neither to be legal nor to endure. Some more coarsely cynical ceremonies were actually held with the assistance of the town butcher, with the bride and groom standing on opposite sides of a side of beef, being joined together with the traditional words, “till death do us part.”

Among more playful frolics was the practice of the bachelors among the Renaissance Italians, and the Italianate Englishmen, of wearing an engagement ring on the hat or in the ear, so as to invite and incite the maidens. In England, the rings were more often confined to the hand, and a language of the fingers developed. A ring on the first (little) finger indicated that the man was seeking a wife; on the second (which we now call the third finger) that he had found her; on the third, that the knot had been tied; and on the fourth, that he had every intention of remaining a bachelor. Similarly, for the woman: first finger, not keeping company; second finger, engaged; third, married; and fourth, intending to die a maid.

It will be noted that in this system the wedding ring did not appear on what is now the usual finger. And indeed it was only gradually that what we now call the third finger of the left hand became the permanent choice for the bond of matrimony. Those who must have reasons have found three for this choice.

The first reason is physiological. It developed when various theories of the blood circulated freely, before the blood itself was known to circulate. The Romans spoke of the vena amoris, the vein of love, but the idea was earlier expressed by the Greeks, who credited it to the Egyptians. This vein of love, they declared, connected the third finger of the left hand directly with the heart, which is the seat, as everyone knows, of the tender passion.

The second reason is the product of logical elimination. The analysis was made by Macrobius, a Roman commentator of the late fourth century. The thumb, Macrobius declared, is too busy to be set apart for special dedication. Because of the shape of the hand, the forefinger and the little finger are only half protected. The middle finger (being in his time used by mothers as a practical suppository and by doctors for anal exploration) was too opprobrious. This left only what he called the pronubus, the one “for the nuptial,” which has ever since been called the ring finger. On the left hand, to indicate the woman’s subjection, it is the engagement finger.

The third explanation grows out of old church practice. The bride was blessed “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Starting with the thumb, if the bridegroom touched one finger with each name, he would complete the trinity with the middle finger, then put the ring on the next one. That finger is the husband’s to whom the woman owes allegiance next to God.

For a long time, it should be mentioned, the wedding ring was worn on the right hand; sometimes on the little finger, as the least obtrusive; while in many eastern lands it has been worn upon the thumb.

Counting Fingers

In his Treatise of Spousals written in 1680, Henry Swinburne declared that the wedding ring “is to be worn on the fourth finger of the left hand, next unto the little finger.” Since his time there has been confusion in the counting.

If we name the fingers, the matter is simple enough: holding the arms outstretched, palms down, and starting from the inside, we have the thumb, the index finger (or pointer or forefinger), the middle finger, the ring finger, and the little finger (or, to use the word borrowed from children, the pinkie).

Numbers complicated the picture. Swinburne counted the thumb as the first finger. The Elizabethans a century before him, as we noted in their practice of indicating their attitude toward matrimony, counted the little finger as the first. The common system of counting today starts not with the thumb, but next to it. Thus the index finger is the first; and the engagement and the wedding ring adorn the third finger of the left hand. Perhaps it is wiser to speak of the fingers by their names. The important thing is that they be fitly adorned.

Memorial Rings

Lighthearted ceremonies were no more than flyspecks on a pattern of permanent matrimony, with no frills of separation or easy divorce. Marriages were “made in heaven”; their earthly aspect ended only at the grave. A married couple had a long time to be fond of or at least to grow used to one another. Death made a great gap in the pattern of family life, so that it came to be marked by a memorial ring. The more pious, indeed, did not await the fearful summons to wear its grim reminder; many wore mortuary rings that, like the skeleton at the feast, kept their final fate solemnly in the minds of the living. These might be shaped with a death’s head, or open to reveal a skeleton or a crucifix. Or they might present a somber motto: “Breathe pain, death gain,” or the forthright counsel, “Live to die.” The favorite stone for such rings, of course, was jet.

Many a will provided money for the purchase of memorial rings by family or friends, thus hoping to keep the dead one alive in thoughts. “Bind me to your hearts with bands of gold.” When Anne of Cleves, divorced wife of Henry VIII, died in 1557, she left money for memorial rings. In 1616 William Shakespeare left twenty-six shillings sixpence apiece to Hamnet Sadler, William Reynolds and “to my fellows,” the actors John Hemynge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell, to buy them rings in his memory. He left no other jewels, no books, and his second-best bed to his wife.

While the 250 odd rings of England’s last King Henry were probably seldom equalled for one person, a more modest but more representative listing was given, in 1649, of the rings of a country lady. She possessed, among other jewels, a toadstone ring, two Turkies (turquoises), six thumb rings, three alderman’s seals, five gemmels and four death’s heads. Always, in every period and every guise, the realm of jewelry has been marked by the reign of the ring.

CHAPTER 17
Some Famous Stones

History and fiction throughout the ages find mystery, glamour and romance in the stories of great jewels. The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most successful of all romances, has its hero achieve his goal by finding a hidden treasure of great jewels. The Queen’s Necklace, another of Dumas’ masterpieces, centers its intrigue around a necklace fraudulently secured, upon which hangs the evidence of Marie Antoinette’s fidelity. Or one thinks of a marauding foreigner, plucking the great emerald from the eye socket of an Orient god—then followed, as in Dunsany’s grisly play A Night at an Inn, by the great stone god itself, come to crush the desecrator and regain its vision.

The Black Prince’s Ruby

The historical stories tell fascinating tales of changes of ownership, as the gems endure across the dying centuries. In the state crown of Britain, guarded in the Tower of London, is a stone called the Black Prince’s ruby. It belonged, when first we hear of it, in 1367, to the King of Granada. Don Pedro, King of Castille, slew him and took the gem. But Edward III of England, the monarch who established the Order of the Garter, had sent Don Pedro some 5,000 men; in thanks for these services, the triumphant Spaniard sent the ruby to Edward’s son, the Black Prince. The ruby was pierced at the top, as though it had, back in its unknown past, been part of a fabulous necklace of an Orient potentate; today, the hole is filled with a small ruby set in gold. The Black Prince, dying before his father, left the stone to his son, who became King Richard II in 1377 and was deposed by Henry IV in 1399 and probably murdered in the very Tower where the ruby now rests. Henry V, to whom it came in his turn, wore the stone at the Battle of Agincourt, where against great odds he defeated the French. After that, it was deemed safer to leave the gem in London; there it became part of the crown jewels. But the crown jewels were scattered by the Puritans in 1642, after Cromwell became Lord Protector. With the Restoration, the Black Prince’s ruby was returned to the crown and has remained unharmed since—save that modern methods of examination have revealed that it is not a ruby at all, only a “balas ruby,” that is, a spinel.

Other Precious Stones

The Stuart sapphire, a great oval an inch and a half by an inch with a hole near the top, can be removed from the royal crown and used as a pendant. This sapphire, after James II was deposed by the Bloodless Revolution of 1688, was carried away from England by the Young Pretender, who—when he grew older and more sage—bequeathed the sapphire, along with other Stuart relics, to George III of England. Since then, it has rested quietly in the crown.

Other precious stones have had their historic moments or movements. Catherine the Great of Russia sent thousands of workers into the Ural mines to hunt for amethysts. Some of Napoleon’s gifts to the Empress Josephine were of emeralds and pearls. The American Museum of Natural History holds among its treasures a great star sapphire weighing 563 carats.

The Crystal Palace

Almost impatiently, however, when great gems are discussed, everyone turns from the other precious stones to talk of diamonds. At the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the pride of Prince Albert in 1851, stones of all sorts were on view. The collection of gems from India, the great subcontinent that was soon to change the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland into an Empire, was stupendous. Queen Victoria noted in her diary: “The girdle of nineteen emeralds is beautiful, all set round with diamonds and fringed with pearls. The rubies are even more wonderful and one is the biggest in the world ... I shall certainly make them Crown Jewels.” Among the pieces exhibited by the lapidaries of Calcutta were strange creations never seen in the western world before: gowries (“blackamoors’ teeth”), golden gothas, ferozahs, a gallobund set with diamonds, and other wonders that have since fallen out of the dictionary. There were also educational exhibits, new and world-shaking inventions like Nasmyth’s steam-propelled engine, the Folkestone express locomotive, and McCormack’s reaping machine from America. But the gaping crowd passed by all these prizes to gather and stare before the diamonds.

The Diamonds

There were diamonds for which there should have been automation to count the value. The great collection of Henry Thomas Hope and his son was displayed, all the glory of their Hope chest, including the mysterious blue stone that came to be called the Hope diamond. There on white velvet lay the great Black Diamond of Bahia, weighing 350 carats, so hard that no one had been able to shape it with facets. And there, not far from a replica of the ship that had just brought it from India, was shown for the first time in England what the catalogue called “the great diamond of Runjeet Singh called the Mountain of Light or the Koh-in-noor.” This is what the millions came to see. (They were disappointed by the sight, for the diamond had been poorly cut and did not reveal all its brilliance.) The Kohinoor lay on a velvet cushion in an iron bird cage on an iron pedestal. When the doors of the Crystal Palace closed each night, wheels began to turn, and the bird cage descended into the pedestal. Safe from all the itching fingers of international thiefdom, the Kohinoor rested in its cage.

The Kohinoor

Mountain of light! The Kohinoor. First worn in the crown, perhaps, of a great ruler in India five thousand years ago. The Koh-i-nur, or Mountain of Light, was next heard of as a great companion to the Darya-i-Nor, the Sea of Light, in the scabbard of Afrasiab around 3,000 B.C. Such are the fabulous stones of ancient times, which Tennyson called

—Jewels five words long,

That on the stretched forefinger of all Time

Sparkle forever.

We are told that the great diamond weighed 700 carats; but, when its modern career began, it had been severed and weighed only 186 carats. In 1304 A.D. the stone was in the family of the Rajah of Malwa in India from whence most of the early diamonds had come. In the early sixteenth century, it was seized as a trophy of war by Beber, first of the Mogul emperors. This long and mighty line, including Shah Jehan who built the Taj Mahal for the jewel of his harem, preserved the great diamond. Jehan set it as one of the eyes of his Peacock Throne. Through the long years of the Mogul Empire, the legend grew that he who owns this diamond rules the world. But all dynasties fall and in 1739 Mohammed Shah, Mogul of Delhi, was conquered by Nadir Shah of Persia. Although the defeated Mogul managed to keep possession of his diamond he could not keep control of his harem. In a group of women there is bound to be one who curries favor with the champion, and one of Mohammed Shah’s harem whispered to the Persian king that the diamond lay hidden in her master’s turban. The etiquette of the day gave the shrewd monarch his opening. The treaty of peace having been signed, the Persian invited the Mogul to dinner and there, admiring his guest’s turban, suggested that they exchange. It was impossible to refuse. In his room, unwinding the silken yards, Nadir Shah saw the great diamond. It lay on the floor, an enormous cone-shaped gem, and he exclaimed “Mountain of Light!”—Koh-i-nur!—thus giving the stone its name.

The legendary power of the stone declined, for it changed hands more times than history records. Nadir Shah was murdered by one of his bodyguards, whose most ingenious tortures could not wring the whereabouts of the diamond from the dead king’s son. It passed on through two generations, until Shah Suja was forced to flee for asylum to the court of Runjit Sing, the Lion of the Punjab, at Lahore (now part of Pakistan). The price of Suja’s safety was the delivery of the Kohinoor to Runjit Sing. And here it was in 1849, when the East India Company and the British took control. As partial indemnity for the damages of the Sikh wars, the Company took the stone, presenting it to Queen Victoria the next year at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Founding of the East India Company by Queen Elizabeth I.

After its exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Queen Victoria decided to have the Kohinoor recut to improve its sparkle. She decided on brilliant faceting. A four-horse-power steam engine was set up in the workshop of the crown jewelers to turn the cutting wheel. Prince Albert set the stone on the mill, and the Duke of Wellington started the wheel. Thirty-eight days later, Queen Victoria was given the new-cut diamond, now weighing only 108 carats but superbly sparkling.

As the Queen’s power grew—in 1876 she became the first ruler of the British Empire, on whose flag the sun never set—the legend of the diamond changed: only queens could wear the gem and prosper. From Victoria it went to her daughter-in-law, Queen Alexandria, and it is now part of the treasure of the royal ladies of the British throne.

Tavernier

Jean Baptiste Tavernier was the first of the great travelers who went to the Orient in search of precious stones. On his voyages he saw and described many stones that have since been lost to history. They may have been recut, by illegitimate owners, into smaller stones, or they may be resting in some hidden treasure store.

The Florentine

Among these lost stones is the Florentine, a clear yellow diamond of 137 carats, which Tavernier saw among the treasures of the Duke of Tuscany in 1657. Legends say that Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was wearing the stone in 1476, when he fell in battle. Picked up by a peasant as an attractive pebble, the stone was sold for a florin; after various adventures it fell into the hands of the Medici. Later, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany married Maria Theresa of Austria, the Florentine became part of the Austrian crown jewels. It went into exile, after World War I, with the imperial family, and half a hundred rumors since have set it in as many hands.

The Great Mogul

Tavernier was probably the only European who ever saw the Great Mogul. It was shown him by Aurangzeb, sixth Mogul Emperor of Hindustani, who had usurped the throne in 1658 and imprisoned his father, the great Shah Jehan. Tavernier said it weighed 280 carats and resembled half an egg sliced through the middle. He was told it had weighed 787 carats in the rough, but had been so badly cut that the jeweler, instead of being paid, had forfeited all his fortune. (Such were the risks conscientious jewelers ran!) When the Persians sacked Delhi in 1739, the Great Mogul may have been among their loot. It probably still adorns a beauty in Iran—unless it turned up in the western world as the Orloff Diamond.

The Orloff

Similar in shape to the Great Mogul but weighing (one can hardly say “only”) 199 carats, the Orloff was among the more than 2,500 diamonds owned by Catherine the Great, ruler of all the Russias. One story says the gem was stolen by a French grenadier from the eye socket of a Hindu idol and hidden in a self-inflicted leg wound. Such accounts recur in tales of many jewels. Another story says that it is one of the stones resulting from the cleavage of the great rough diamond that also produced the Kohinoor.

At any rate, it was purchased in Holland in 1774 by the Russian Count Gregory Orloff for 400,000 rubles ($450,000). The Count had been a favorite of Catherine’s; she had made him a prince and the commander-in-chief of her armies. The Court did not mind—or could not help—the number of Catherine’s lovers; but she seemed on the verge of actually marrying the Count. Her entourage therefore set their wits to work, and Orloff fell from favor. For Catherine’s name day, when others at Court presented the customary bouquets, Orloff gave her the diamond. His family’s fortune had been pledged for it, but it failed to re-open Catherine’s arms to him. She never wore the diamond but had it mounted in her sceptre, right under the double eagle. Under that symbol of imperial power, it presumably rests in the Kremlin today. A more prosaic version of the Count’s enterprise states that he assured himself of heart balm by selling the diamond to Catherine for £90,000 plus a £4,000 life annuity.

The Shah of Persia

Another diamond reported by Tavernier and now reposing in the Kremlin is an 88-carat bar-shaped stone of finest quality. It has a tiny furrow cut in it, presumably to secure the cord by which Tavernier, in 1665, saw it suspended in front of the Mogul throne. It also has engraved on it three names and dates. The first name is that of an Indian prince, Bourhan-Nizam Shah II; the date, the year 1000 in the Mohammedan count, the western 1591. The second engraving, in the western year 1651, sets this gem as another among the treasures of the great Mogul Shah Jehan. The third date is western 1824; the owner, the Shah of Persia.

The Persians possessed the jewel until 1889, when a Teheran mob slew the Russian ambassador, the thirty-four-year-old playwright Griboyedov. As a sign of their regret, the Persian royal house sent the Shah Diamond to Russia, where it has remained.

The Great Table

Another stone that Tavernier was the only European to look upon is the Great Table Diamond, sometimes called the White Tavernier. This 242-carat stone is described by the French traveler: “When at Golconda in 1642, I was shown this stone, and it is the largest diamond I have ever seen in India in the hands of merchants. The owner allowed me to make a model of it in lead, which I sent to Surat to two of my friends, telling them of its beauty and the price, namely, 500,000 rupees. I received an order from them, that if it was clean and of fine water, I should offer 400,000 rupees; but it was impossible to purchase it at that price.” The asking price was about $280,000, for want of which the Great Table has totally disappeared.

The table cut—which was virtually discontinued after 1520, when the rose cut grew popular—sliced the gem into a flat slab, sometimes so thin that the diamond was used as a “portrait stone,” set over a miniature painting.

The Blue Tavernier

One diamond that Tavernier brought back from his travels was a blue diamond, roughly heart-shaped, of 112 carats. He sold it in 1668 to Louis XIV of France. It was recut as a slightly pointed drop, being reduced in the process to 68 carats. Louis XV set the diamond in his Order of the Golden Fleece. It was also worn by Louis XVI but was among the treasures of the royal house that disappeared at the beginning of the French Revolution in the great crown jewel robbery. Of these, only the Regent and the Sancy were recovered.

The fate of the Blue Tavernier is in doubt. One story runs that the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece were smuggled to England, where later this diamond was recut. A one-carat blue diamond, last heard of in London, is supposed to have come from the tip. A second stone is a blue drop diamond that came into the possession of the Duke of Brunswick. The third and largest cut is the Hope Diamond.

The Hope

Without any guarantee of this past history, Henry Thomas Hope in 1836 bought a superb blue diamond of 44 carats. Blue diamonds are exceedingly rare; the nearest in weight to the Hope Diamond are the Brunswick diamond, mentioned just above, of almost 14 carats, and a 35-carat stone, the Wittlesbach, exhibited in London in 1930.

The Hope Diamond was willed by Lady Hope, in 1887, to her daughter’s son on condition that he adopt the family name. He became Lord Francis Pelham Clinton Hope. In 1894 he married the American actress May Yohe who wore the diamond when she sang in the music halls. It is said to have been part of the “stage jewelry” listed among her belongings when her trunks were held for a lodging debt, but it was returned to the Hope family.

In 1908 the gem was bought for $400,000 by Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey. With the breath of revolution on his neck, the Sultan three years later sent it to Paris to be sold. It became part of the famed collection of Mrs. Edward B. McLean, whose gems dazzled Washington, D. C., for almost forty years. After her death, it was bought in 1949 by Harry Winston, noted diamond merchant of New York.

The Jehan Akbar Shah

This diamond deserves distinction as the second great eye of the Peacock Throne of the Mogul Emperors. It was engraved with the names of Shah Akbar and his grandson, Shah Jehan. It weighed 116 carats. After Shah Jehan was deposed by his son in 1666, the stone disappeared. Precisely two hundred years later it was shown in Constantinople as the Shepherd stone. Recognized by the inscriptions, the diamond was bought by an English merchant. In London, it was recut to 71 carats, losing the inscriptions and sold to the Gaekwar of Baroda.

The Cullinan

The largest diamond ever discovered was found in 1905 in the Premier Mine in South Africa, which had been opened by Sir Thomas Cullinan. The rough stone, weighing 3,106 carats, about one and a third pounds, was bought by the Transvaal Government and presented to King Edward VII of England, in 1907, on his sixty-sixth birthday.

The Cullinan was sent to Amsterdam to be cut. There, after months of study, the expert set the cleaving blade on the diamond and tapped it with a heavy rod. The blade broke. On the second try, the expert fainted. He recovered to find the great diamond split precisely as planned. Out of the great Cullinan came nine major gems and ninety-six smaller brilliants. The greatest of the cuttings, called the Great Star of Africa, weighs 530 carats, and is the largest cut diamond in the world. It adorns the sceptre of the British Empire. The other large stones are also part of the British Crown jewels.

The Excelsior

Mention should be made of the Excelsior, a diamond of 995 carats, found in the Orange Free State in 1893 and, until the discovery of the Cullinan, the largest diamond known. The Excelsior was noticed by accident, seen by a native in a shovelful of gravel he was pitching onto a truck.

The stone was cut in 1903 by the same firm, Asscher of Amsterdam, that later cut the Cullinan; but the cutting is unique in that all the resulting stones—twenty-one gems—are either pear-shaped or marquise.

The Regent

The Regent Diamond, like the Blue Tavernier, was stolen from the French royal treasures at the brink of the Revolution, but unlike the others this gem was recovered and restored to its place in France. A superb stone, the diamond weighed 410 carats in 1701, when it was picked up by a slave in the Partial Mines of India. The slave, following storied precedent, gashed his leg and hid the stone in the bandage. He limped his way to the seacoast. There he offered to share the proceeds of the sale of the stone with a sea captain; but unfortunately the slave did not survive the rigors of the ocean voyage, and the ship’s arrival in Bombay found the captain in sole possession of the stone.

From an Indian merchant it was bought by Thomas Pitt, then Governor of Madras, and sent to England to be cut. Political enemies bruited abroad that he had obtained the stone by questionable means; though they never got to the core of the matter, he became known as Diamond Pitt. He sold the diamond in 1717 to the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France, for about $500,000, which kept the family in affluence through several generations. But at any moment in the political careers of the great English statesman, William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the Younger—major figures in the struggles with the American colonies and the American Revolution—there might be dragged out, as a political target, that family skeleton about the coming of the Pitt Diamond to England.

The Pitt Diamond, now renamed the Regent, was cut into a cushion-shaped brilliant of 140 carats, a superbly sparkling specimen of a great gem deftly handled. Marie Antoinette used it to adorn a large black velvet hat she favored, borrowing it from the crown of Louis XV. But it remained with the royal jewels until they were all stolen in 1792.

Found in a Paris garret, the diamond came to Napoleon, who pawned it to secure funds for his triumphant campaigns. After using the stone in this fashion several times, he had it set into the hilt of his ceremonial coronation sword.

When Napoleon went into exile, the stone accompanied his second wife, Marie Louise, to the Chateau of Blois. Her father, the Emperor of Austria, returned it to Louis XVIII. The diamond shuttled between the Napoleons and the Louis until France became a republic. When the French crown jewels were auctioned in 1886, the Regent Diamond was withheld from the sale.

By lying quietly behind a stone panel of a chateau in Chambord, the Regent escaped capture by the Germans in the Second World War. It is now on display in the Louvre where, like the Kohinoor cage at the Crystal Palace, its case sinks nightly into a burglar-proof vault.

The Sancy

The Sancy and the Regent are the only jewels of the French royal treasure that were recovered after the robbery of 1792. Legend has confused the early story of the Sancy stone with that of the Florentine Diamond, but it has had enough vicissitudes to make an historic tale. A superb and fiery stone of 54 carats, one of the first ever cut in symmetrical facets, the diamond was bought in Constantinople, about 1570, by the French Ambassador to Turkey, the Seigneur de Sancy. Back at the court of his king, vicious and vain Henry III, Sancy was constrained to lend the diamond to his monarch, who set it in the cap he wore to cover his baldness.

The shrewd successor to the throne, Henry IV, made Sancy the Minister of Finance, and the again borrowed diamond was used as security to raise troops. The stone was sent to the moneylenders in Metz; but the messenger was waylaid and slain. The diamond vanished. Sure of the man’s loyalty, Sancy recovered the body and had an autopsy performed; and from the stomach of the faithful servant the diamond was recovered.

Wary of further loans, Sancy sold the diamond to Queen Elizabeth I of England. It stayed with the royal house until Charles I was beheaded. The Earl of Worcester, to whom Charles’ widow had entrusted it, returned it when the monarchy was restored. In the second Revolution in 1688, James II took it to France. There, after a time, it passed from the royal exile to his diamond-hungry host, Louis XIV. Again the gem stayed with a royal house until the turbulence of revolution; the Sancy, along with the other royal treasures, was stolen in the tumultuous days of 1792.

For almost forty years the Sancy’s story is hidden. In 1828 it turned up in hands that sold it to Prince Demidoff of Russia, husband of the Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon Bonaparte. Many of this Princess’ jewels were designed by Louis François Cartier, whose creations she made popular at the court of the Empress Eugénie, thus giving impetus to the young House of Cartier.

But at this point the story of the Sancy Diamond takes a double path. Sold to the Maharajah of Patiala and set in platinum, it remains part of the treasure of the land from which it first came. So goes the story. But either the Sancy diamond or a mysterious twin is worn by the former Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, now Lady Astor.

What further wars such gems may survive, and what owners they may be cherished by, in the coming centuries, future historians may tell.

Out of the Earth

From the dull earth comes the bright sparkle of the diamond. Early prospectors, as gold-hunters panned the streams, sifted the surface gravel. When likely spots were located, men and machines began to dig. At Kimberly, the mine shaft is more than 3500 feet deep. One diamond may be secured for each 21 million parts of ore; but gem diamonds in the larger sizes are so much more rare than industrials or gems in the smaller sizes that more than 250 tons must be mined to yield a stone that can be cut and polished into a one-carat gem.

A purchaser, at the end of this arduous searching, must see to the four C’s of diamond value. First the weight in carats. Although more labor goes into the preparing of five one-carat gems than of one five-carat gem, the single large stone is worth more than the sum of the five. Comparatively few rough diamonds can be effectively cut into large-carat stones.

Second, the clarity. A flawless gem, by official standard, is one in which no imperfection is visible to the trained eye under tenth-power magnification. Such a stone can be shaped to fullest brilliance.

Third, the color. Rarest is the pure colorless diamond, together with the flawless blue. Slightly yellowish tints are in disfavor, but red again is extremely rare and highly valued. Of all, the colorless, or white, diamond, is most likely to be richly responsive to light.

Fourth, the cut. Not merely how well does the particular cut—brilliant, marquise, rose, and the rest—become the diamond; but, whatever the cutting, how well was it made? That is the pertinent question. And perhaps there should be added to this the matter of the setting—the degree to which the finished jewel sets off, displays and enhances the precious stone.

When these qualities are properly present, when a choice gem in a fine jewel adorns a fair lady, then one may truly say, in every sense, that all beholders are privileged to look upon beauty in jewels.

Transcriber’s Note: On [page 221], the line “revolution, there is no need to wear more elaborate jewels” was erroneously printed as the first line of the page. It has been moved to the correct place. A few other typos have been corrected without further note.