THE ‘Choycest of my Jewells’, in the codicil to the will written by Restoration noblewoman Christian, Countess of Devonshire in 1674, included two diamond lockets. She had purchased the stones from William Gomeldon, or Gumbleton, an enterprising former skinner who had made a fortune supplying gemstones to Charles II.
Such was the value the Countess attached to the lockets that she stipulated they were to be kept by her son for ‘the use of the Heire Male of the Earls of Devonshire’. A generation later, at his death in 1707, Sir Miles Stapleton bequeathed to his wife a veritable treasure chest of jewellery. Foremost among the precious trinkets listed in his will was ‘one diamond locket set with eight and forty diamonds’, for which Sir Miles recorded that he had paid the handsome sum of £100.
Largely overlooked during the second half of the past century, lockets—previously costlier, more sumptuous
