THE ESSEX RING

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 6 September 1927, Page 6

THE ESSEX RING

QUEEN ELIZABETH’S LOVE TOKEN GIFT TO THE ABBEY. London, July 15. The famous Essex ring—given as a pledge by Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Essex as a surety for his pardon—has been placed on the tomb of Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey. This ring was sold by auction at Christie’s a few days ago for 520 guineas, the purchaser being Mr Ernest Makower, of Holmwood, Binfield, Oxfordshire. When he bought it, it was announced that he intended to give it to the public, and his offer of it to the Abbey was at once accepted by the Dean. A formal presentation was made yesterday, and when a suitable case (which will probably exhibit the contents through a magnifying glass) has been made for it, the ring will be permanently on view on the tomb of the Queen, just beneath a window which will enable it to be seen in a good light. The gold of the ring is worn so thin now that the hoop is broken; and of the two little blue enamel cinquefoils engraved beneath the stone one has lost a petal. But the portrait is unimpaired by time and tragedy. It is a cameo cut in a sardoynx of three strata. Against a black background the whole profile of the Queen gleamsout, and the hair is of the auburn which was hers by Nature before the time came when she covered her grey and scanty locks with one of her fant;\’ically brilliant wigs, and dared not look in a “true” mirror. The sharkskin case is not contemporary with the ring—it is probably 17th or early 18th century—but it seems likely that it has long shared the ring’s undoubted descent from the very finger of Essex to its home on the tomb of the Queen who would not save him because she believed him too proud, and too little her true servant, to save himself. THE TRAGIC ROMANCE. “Historians are not unanimous in accepting the tale as true,” says “The Times.” “But it has more authority than that of an unbroken family tradition, and it is one of those stories which are worth preserving because they enrich and do not oppose the historical truth which they themselves may possibly lack. To her tempestuous, wilful young adorer the Queen gave the ring on the eve of his sailing in 1596 on the expedition to Cadiz. What ever crimes he should be accused of or should have committed, he should have her pardon when he showed or sent her this pledge. Not four years later the rebel Essex lay in the Tower under sentence of death. The Queen would not sign his death-warrant—signed it. withdrew it. She was waiting, says history, for Essex to ask her pardon; she was waiting, says the story, for Essex to send her the ring. Essex refused the advice of his friends to ask for pardon. He was waiting, says history, as his pride had wait more than once before, for the Queen to take the first step. He was trusting, says the story, to the ring. He had sent it. But the messenger had made a mistake, and had taken it not to the doomed man’s friend and cousin, Lady Scroope, but to her sister, Lady Nottingham, the wife of the Lord Admiral, who was one of Essex’s bitterest enemies. And the Lord Admiral saw to it that the ring went no farther. A DEATH-BED CONFESSION. “When Lady Nottingham lay on her death-bed she begged the Queen to come and see her, and told her the truth. Elizabeth, old and miserable as she had been ever since Essex’s death —mortua non sepulta, as she used to moan—had strength enough left to fly into one of her Royal rages, to shake or strike the dying woman, and cry. ‘God may forgive you, but I never can!’ And three weeks later the Queen herself was dead. These old passions of love and fury, of jealousy, and aching hope and grim despair, have long been stilled. But the most coldly scientific of historians will admit that the story of Queen Elizabath and Essex is one of the most romantic tragedies that history has to tell. And when the ring is fixed in position on the Queen’s tomb, those who see it may take it as a symbol that a high, historic quarrel has been made up, and that a man and a woman of genius, whose fellowship and joint work for England went astray in life, are reconciled in death.”