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.