An excellent description of the jewellery of Elizabeth towards the close of her brilliant reign is given by Paul Hentzner, who visited England in 1598: "The Queen had in her ears two pearls with very rich drops; she wore false hair and that red; upon her head she had a small crown; her bosom was uncovered, and she had on a necklace of exceedingly fine jewels. She was dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and over it a mantle of black silk shot with silver threads; her train was very long. Instead of a chain, she had an oblong collar of gold and jewels." To a courtier who knelt to her, "after pulling off her glove, she gave her right hand to kiss, sparkling with rings and jewels."
The best of all representations of that "bright occidental Star" is her faded waxwork effigy, still to be seen in Westminster Abbey—no other than the one which on the 28th of April, 1603, was carried on her coffin to the Abbey. It shows the veritable passion Elizabeth possessed for pearls. Her stomacher is encrusted with large Roman pearls, while strings of pearls hang round her throat and neck. Her earrings are circular pearl and ruby medallions, with huge pear-shaped pearl pendants.
Full of detail are the records of costly "juelles" that have come down to us, particularly in the list, preserved in the British Museum,[138] of the New Year's gifts presented to the Queen, from the fourteenth to the thirty-sixth year of her reign. The practice of exchanging presents on New Year's Day attained extraordinary proportions at the Court of Elizabeth, and was supplemented by birthday presents, which, as Her Majesty's weakness for jewellery was well known, took for the most part the form of personal ornaments of every kind. The very accurate accounts that were kept by the officers of the Queen's wardrobe of every item in her enormous store of jewellery is witnessed by a number of curious entries in her wardrobe-book of losses of jewellery sustained by Her Majesty.[139]
In addition to numerous inventories and wills full of information concerning the jewellery of the period, we have at our service, as in Roman times, the works of social satirists, such as The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes (1583), and Bishop Hall's poetical satires of 1597, to which we are indebted for many valuable details. In accepting these it is well to bear in mind the common tendency of every age to ridicule its own fashions; yet, in spite of Puritan narrowness, and the exaggerated indignation of the satirist, it is manifest that extraordinary luxury and extravagance in dress and jewellery were prevalent not only at Court, but among all classes of the community.
Of greater importance, however, than the information to be gleaned from pictorial and literary sources is that derived from the actual jewels themselves, a considerable number of which, through all the changes and chances of more than three centuries, have been handed down still practically intact, and retaining the chief feature of their decoration—their exquisite enamel. Shakespeare, while appreciating the charm of its harmonious combination of colours, recognised, it appears, the delicacy of this beautiful medium, when in the Comedy of Errors he makes Adriana say:—
I see the jewel best enamelled
Will lose his beauty; yet the gold bides still,
That others touch, and often touching will
Wear gold.
The New Learning, which made itself felt in England during the reign of Henry VII, began at this time to exercise a direct influence on the choice of the designs of jewels and on the arrangement of their ornamentation. As witnesses of the intellectual revival, they often took emblematic forms, bearing in exquisite enamel-work fancy mottoes and devices, generally obscure in their interpretation, and intended to express the sentiments of their wearers, or those of donors, regarding the presumed state of mind of their recipients.
The passion for these reached its height in the golden days of Good Queen Bess, when it became the fashion for the bejewelled gallants who fluttered like a swarm of glittering insects around her to display their wit and ingenuity in devising jewelled emblems as fit presents to the Virgin Queen. Thus in the list of costly articles of jewellery offered to Elizabeth, we meet with the present, made in Christmas week 1581, by some courtiers disguised as maskers, of a jewel in the form of "a flower of golde, garnished with sparcks of diamonds, rubyes, and ophales, with an agathe of her Majestis phisnamy and a perle pendante, with devices painted in it." The love for strange devices and enigmatical mottoes was fostered by the spirit of an age that witnessed the production of Lyly's Euphues and Spenser's Faerie Queene; while Elizabeth's colossal vanity prompted the dedication to her of highly laudatory mottoes, like the inscription on a jewel belonging to Mr. Pierpont Morgan: hei mihi quod tanto virtus perfusa decore non habet eternos inviolata dies. Few of the jewels of this stirring period display a more charming symbolism than those produced after the defeat and destruction of the Spanish Armada, whereon England is figured as an ark floating securely and tranquilly on a troubled sea, surrounded by the motto, saevas tranquilla per undas. The most remarkable of these Armada jewels is Mr. Pierpont Morgan's, just mentioned, and another of the same class in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan.
A jewel more characteristic of the period than any other, and an historical relic of singular interest, is that chef d'œuvre of inventive genius—the Lennox or Darnley jewel, the property of His Majesty the King. It is covered inside and out with the most elaborate symbolism, and contains altogether no less than twenty-eight emblems and six mottoes (Pl. XXVIII, 4). Internal evidence proves this remarkable jewel to have been made by order of Lady Margaret Douglas, mother of Henry Darnley, in memory of her husband, Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, who was killed in 1571.
Among many other examples of Elizabethan jewellery, there stand out above the rest a certain number to which, besides their high artistic excellence, is attached the additional interest of historical associations. To this class belong the following important jewels: the Berkeley heirlooms, belonging to Lord Fitzhardinge; the Drake jewels, the property of Sir Francis Fuller-Eliott-Drake; the Wild Jewel (Miss Wild); the Barbor Jewel (Victoria and Albert Museum); and the Phœnix Jewel (Sloane Collection, British Museum). Public and private collections likewise contain a considerable number of enamelled miniature cases furnished with loops for suspension, and cameos set with jewelled and enamelled mountings of the period.