of her jewels, very secretly to London, by his trusty agent, Sir Nicholas Elphinstone, who undertook to negotiate their sale, with the assistance of Throgmorton, to whom he was directed for that purpose.  As these pearls were considered the most magnificent in Europe, Queen Elizabeth was complimented with the first offer of them.  ‘She saw them yesterday, May 2nd,’ writes Bodutel La Forrest, the French ambassador at the Court of England, ’in the presence of the Earls of Pembroke and Leicester, and pronounced them to be of unparalleled beauty.’  He thus describes them:  ’There are six cordons of large pearls, strung as paternosters; but there are five-and-twenty separate from the rest, much finer and larger than those which are strung; these are for the most part like black muscades.  They had not been here more than three days, when they were appraised by various merchants; this Queen wishing to have them at the sum named by the jeweller, who could have made his profit by selling them again.  They were at first shown to three or four working jewellers and lapidaries, by whom they were estimated at three thousand pounds sterling, (about ten thousand crowns,) and who offered to give that sum for them.  Several Italian merchants came after them, who valued them at twelve thousand crowns, which is the price, as I am told, this Queen Elizabeth will take them at.  There is a Genoese who saw them after the others, and said they were worth sixteen thousand crowns; but I think they will allow her to have them for twelve thousand.’  ‘In the mean time,’ continues he, in his letter to Catherine of Medicis, ’I have not delayed giving your Majesty timely notice of what was going on, though I doubt she will not allow them to escape her.  The rest of the jewels are not near so valuable as the pearls.  The only thing I have heard particularly described is a piece of unicorn richly carved and decorated.’  Mary’s royal mother-in-law of France, no whit more scrupulous than her good cousin of England, was eager to compete with the latter for the purchase of the pearls, knowing that they were worth nearly double the sum at which they had been valued in London.  Some of them she had herself presented to Mary, and especially wished to recover; but the ambassador wrote to her in reply, that ’he had found it impossible to accomplish her desire of obtaining the Queen of Scots’ pearls, for, as he had told her from the first, they were intended for the gratification of the Queen of England, who had been allowed to purchase them at her own price, and they were now in her hands.’

“Inadequate though the sum for which her pearls were sold was to their real value, it assisted to turn the scale against their real owner.