By the side of the earl of Pembroke, towards the northern windows of the Round of the Temple Church, reposes a youthful warrior, clothed in armour of chain mail; he has a long buckler on his left arm, and his hands are pressed together in supplication upon his breast. This is the monumental effigy of Robert Lord de Ros, and is the most elegant and interesting in appearance of all the cross-legged figures in the Temple Church. The head is uncovered, and the countenance, which is youthful, has a remarkably pleasing expression, and is graced with long and flowing locks of curling hair. On the left side of the figure is a ponderous sword, and the armour of the legs has a ridge or seam up the front, which is continued over the knee, and forms a kind of garter below the knee. The feet are trampling on a lion, and the legs are crossed in token that the warrior was one of those military enthusiasts who so strangely mingled religion and romance, "whose exploits form the connecting link between fact and fiction, between history and the fairy tale." It has generally been thought that this interesting figure is intended to represent a genuine Knight Templar clothed in the habit of his order, and the loose garment or surcoat thrown over the ring-armour, and confined to the waist by a girdle, has been described as "a flowing mantle with a kind of _cowl_." This supposed cowl is nothing more than a fold of the chain mail, which has been covered with a thick coating of paint. The mantle is the common surcoat worn by the secular warriors of the day, and is not the habit of the Temple. Moreover, the long curling hair manifests that the warrior whom it represents could not have been a Templar, as the brethren of the Temple were required to cut their hair close, and they wore long beards. In an antient genealogical account of the Ros family,[520] written at the commencement of the reign of Henry the Eighth, A. D. 1513, two centuries after the abolition of the order of the Temple, it is stated that Robert Lord de Ros became a Templar, and was buried at London. The writer must have been mistakened, as that nobleman remained in possession of his estates up to the day of his death, and his eldest son, after his decease, had livery of his lands, and paid his fine to the king in the usual way, which would not have been the case if the Lord de Ros had entered into the order of the Temple. He was doubtless an associate or honorary member of the fraternity, and the circumstance of his being buried in the Temple Church probably gave rise to the mistake. The shield of his monumental effigy is charged with three water bougets, the armorial ensigns of his family, similar to those observable in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey.