The rich Arundel Collection, chiefly brought together by a Lord Howard of Arundel, towards the end of the seventeenth century, incorporated in the Marlborough Cabinet and later dispersed, included a beautifully adorned gold ring set with a splendid lapis lazuli on which a Roman engraver had cut the design of Hercules wrestling with Antæus. The hoop of this ring is ornamented on the inside with two fleur-de-lys in white enamel, the entire ring being covered with arabesques of entwined vine branches in black enamel. In his description, Rev. C. W. King conjectures from the style of ornamentation that the ring may have belonged to one of the Valois kings of France.[295] On the accession of Frederick the Great, he is said to have found in the royal treasury a case containing a ring, accompanied by a memorandum to the following effect, in the handwriting of King Frederick I (1688–1740): “This ring was given to me by my father on his death-bed, with the reminder that so long as it was preserved in the House of Brandenburg, this would not only prosper, but would grow and increase.” The way in which Frederick the Great spoke of this ring illustrates at once his habitual scepticism and his devotion to family tradition, for while declaring that he put no faith in the peculiar virtues of such an object, he gave strict injunctions that it should be carefully preserved. A rather doubtful tradition designates this ring as the one said to have been surreptitiously removed from the hand of Frederick William I, when he was dying, by the Countess Lichtenau. The dying king feebly protesting against this spoliation, murmured: “Her den Ring” (Give back the ring), but the countess saved the situation by saying to those assembled in the deathchamber: “He wants to have a herring!” This same tradition attributes the subsequent disastrous defeat of Prussia by Napoleon I to the loss of the ring, which the countess finally yielded to Frederick William III in 1813, whereupon the fortunes of war changed and Prussia was avenged for her humiliations. Hofrath Schneider, for a long time reader to Emperor William I, relates that when he questioned that monarch touching the story of the ring, he only learned that it had been a long time in the Hohenzollern family; that it was an old-fashioned ring, and that it was set with “a plain, dark-colored stone.” Emperor William did not display much interest in the matter and did not appear to have any superstitious reverence for the ring.[296]