454 THE BOOK OF THE PEARL
very
anxious to obtain these pearls; but the ambassador wrote on May 15,
1568, that he had found it impossible to purchase them; for, as he had
told her from the first, they were intended for the gratification of
the Queen of England, who had purchased them at her own price, and was
even then in possession of them.1
Queen Elizabeth's Pearls. Although
in her youth she is said to have had a distaste for personal
decorations, in her later years Queen Elizabeth entertained an
extravagant fondness for pearls. In speaking of her portraits, Horace
Walpole says: "A pale Roman nose, a head of hair loaded with crowns and
powdered with diamonds, a vast ruff, a vaster fardingale, and a bushel
of pearls, are features by which everybody knows at once the pictures
of Queen Elizabeth."2 And to the end, her love for them was
unabated, for in the last tragi-comic scene of her life, to meet the
Angel of Death himself, she was dressed up in her most splendid jewels
with great pearl necklaces and earrings and pendants, as Paul
Delaroche so successfully pictured in his remarkable painting in the
Louvre.
The faded waxwork effigy of her, long preserved in Westminster Abbey in that curious collection of effigies3—the
"Ragged Regiment," as Walpole called them—has a coronet of large
spherical pearls in wax, long necklaces of them, a great
pearl-ornamented stomacher, pearl earrings with large pear-shaped
pendants, and even broad, pearl medallions on the shoe-bows. In
accordance with that singular custom which prevailed from the time of
Henry V (1422), to that of Queen Anne (1714),4 this effigy
lay on her coffin at the funeral· and caused, says Stow in his
Chronicle, "such a general sighing, groning, and weeping, as the like
hath not beene seene or knowne in the memory of man." A contemporaneous
poet wrote that when the corpse with the effigy passed down the Thames
to lie in state at Whitehall,
Fish wept their eyes of pearl quite out, And swam blind after.
Gresham Pearl. During
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Thomas Gresham, the merchant prince,
was credited with possessing a pearl valued at £15,000, which he
reduced to powder and drank in a glass of wine to the health of the
queen, in order to astonish the Spanish ambassador, with whom he had
laid a wager that he would give a more costly
