The famous collection of jewels gathered together in the treasury of the Santa Casa, at Loreto, Italy, was plundered during the French occupation in 1797, and all trace of most of the magnificent ornaments has been lost. These represented the gifts of many crowned heads and titled personages; among the former was the unfortunate Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, who donated a golden heart-shaped jewel with the words “Jesus Maria” incrusted in diamonds. This jewel is described as being “as big as both a man’s hands, opened onto two leaves, on one of which was the figure of the Blessed Virgin and on the other a portrait of the queen herself.”[392] Of the many rich vestments for decorating the statue of the Virgin in the sanctuary, the most splendid was the gift of the Infanta Isabel of Flanders, and was valued at 40,000 crowns. In a seventeenth-century account by an English traveller it is thus described:[393] Its set thick with six rows of diamonds downe before, to the number of three thousand, and its all wrought over with a kinde of embroidery of little pearle set thick everywhere within the flowers with great round pearle, to the number twenty thousand pearles in all. The same writer tells us the niche in which the statue was placed was bordered with a row of precious stones of great number, size, and value, the colors being so varied that this bordering formed “a rich Iris of several colors.” There is also said to have been a great pearl, set in gold, and engraved with the image of the Virgin and Child.[394] It seems probable that this was a jewel made of a baroque pearl, or pearls, completed by enamel-work so as to represent the sacred figures. The pectoral cross worn in solemn processions by the prior of the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial was adorned with eight perfect emeralds, five diamonds, and five pearls. From it hung a splendid pear-shaped pearl, the gift of Philip II in 1595, and one of the finest of those acquired by this monarch. In 1740 the cross was valued at 50,000 crowns, Philip’s great pearl not being included in this valuation.[395] The monastery of Streoneshalh, later Whitby Abbey, was founded about 656 A.D. by Oswy, King of Northumbria, in fulfilment of a vow made before his victory over the pagan king Penda, at the battle of Winwidfield, fought in November, 654. St. Hilda was made abbess of this monastery, and Oswy’s daughter Aelfleda took the veil and eventually, in 680, succeeded Hilda as abbess; she died in 713.[396] Tradition relates that at this early date crosses and rosaries were made for the inmates of the monastery from the jet found in the neighborhood. The “Whitby jet,” so popular and fashionable in the eighteenth century, was largely derived from the same source, and since then has had several revivals, until replaced by black-stained chalcedony, the so-called onyx, and, later still, by steel carved with glass and glass itself.