Lady Moray paid no attention to Queen Mary’s request for the return of her jewels, well knowing that she was in no condition for enforcing her demands.
[68] ‘The skull and skeleton decorations for rings’ (remarks Mr. Fairholt) ‘first came into favour and fashion at the obsequious court of France, when Diana, of Poictiers, became the mistress of Henry the Second. At that time she was a widow, and in mourning, so black and white became fashionable colours; jewels were formed like funeral memorials; golden ornaments, shaped like coffins, holding enamelled skeletons, hung from the neck; watches, made to fit in little silver skulls, were attached to the waists of the denizens of a court that alternately indulged in profanity or piety, but who mourned show.’
[69] Biblical Monuments, by William Harris Rule, D.D., and J. Corbet Anderson; 1871, 1873.
[70] This great founder of the Merovingian dynasty, the father of Clovis, died in 482, and was buried with his treasures, weapons, and robes. Nearly twelve hundred years afterwards, a labourer, a poor deaf and dumb man, accidentally discovered the royal grave, and was astonished, and almost terrified, at the sight of the treasures it contained. Among them was the signet-ring alluded to, which, with a considerable number of the other treasures of the tomb, were deposited in the Bibliothèque, then ‘Royale,’ at Paris, which was broken into by burglars in 183-. An alarm being given, in their hasty flight they threw the objects into the Seine; the ring was not recovered.
In the tomb were found, besides the skeletons of his horse and page, his arms; a cornelian Etruscan scarab, doubtless deposited therein as an amulet of wondrous virtue; also a crystal divining-ball, two inches in diameter, and more than three hundred little bees, of the purest gold, their wings being inlaid with a red stone like cornelian.
On the authority of the historian Augustin Thierry, it is stated that these ornaments resembling bees were only what in French are called fleurons (supposed to have been attached to the harness of his war-horse). Montfaucon is of the same opinion.
[71] I am greatly indebted to this gentleman for the loan of a manuscript catalogue of ring mottos and inscriptions on wedding-rings, of which—besides those exhibited at the Kensington Museum—I have availed myself in the following pages of this chapter. Mr. Singer has, I believe, the finest collection of inscribed wedding-rings known, numbering two hundred and forty-five specimens of every kind, in gold and silver, each weighing from three dwts. and upwards, and none less than a hundred years old, some dating from five hundred years.
Mr. Singer’s collection is also enriched with some interesting betrothal rings, and there are fourteen double-line motto-rings which are matchless. This collection has been accumulated during the last quarter of a century, at a very considerable cost.
[72]This play upon words has been applied in a political sense. ‘So,’ as the late Mr. Crofton Croker observed, ‘when the Repeal question was agitated in Ireland, rings and brooches, set in precious stones, made to represent the word “Repeal” were popular:—
R uby
E merald
P earl
E merald
A methyst
L apis lazuli.