Note 292 — Chapter VII

The first appears in Aubery's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Hollande 1687, 214; with another apocryphal tale about finding the bones of Edward IV's children as early as Elizabeth's time. Aubery asserts that he heard the history of the ring from his father's mouth, who had heard it from Prince Maurice of Orange, to whom it had been communicated by the English ambassador Carleton. According to him the Queen then took to her bed, dressed as she was, sprang from it a hundred times during the night, and starved herself to death. Who does not, in reading this, feel himself in a sphere of wild romance? Lady Spelman has tried to clear away the improbability involved in it, that Essex should have applied to the wife of one of his enemies, by making Essex give the ring to a boy passing by, who was to give it, not to the Countess of Nottingham, but to her sister, and then mistook the two ladies.