The Court Jewellers and Goldsmiths, according to ancient custom, made to the Keeper a present of £20 in gold when he signed their annual bills. This was in the bad old days doubtless a bribe, so that the bill might not be too closely scrutinised. We may also be well assured that the £20 did not come out of the Jeweller’s pocket, but was fully covered by adding a little here and there to each item in the bill. It is refreshing to learn that as early as the seventeenth century, some Keepers recognising the questionable nature of this £20 present, refused absolutely to take it, and checked the bills honestly. Needless to say that at the present day the Keeper is put into no such invidious position; in fact he never sees a bill, all these being discharged by the Lord Chamberlain, who, it is hardly necessary to mention, does not receive a £20 honorarium from Messrs. Gerrard, the Court Jewellers, for doing so. In the days when the Keeper of the Regalia followed the King wherever he went, rooms were reserved for him, his officers, and his servants, in all the King’s palaces. Then breezes, as might now, arose amongst the various Court officials as to the apportioning of the available accommodation. Thus we find the Keeper recording that, in 1660, the lodgings provided for him at the Palace in Whitehall were rude, dark, and intermixed with those of the Queen’s Household. The dining-room was “a kind of wild barn, without any covering beside rafters and tiles. The Keeper’s lodgings were two ill chambers, above stairs, and the passage to them dark at noon-day.” Perhaps naturally under these mixed conditions, and tempers being shortened by the rain pouring through the tiles during dinner, the relations between the Keeper, who was a member of the King’s Household, and the members of the Queen’s Household, became colder and colder, till at length each flew to their titular heads. The Queen’s Household no doubt had excellent grounds of complaint, as had also doubtless the Keeper, and thus both were even. But the Keeper, being an astute person, played a final tramp card; he said he could not be responsible for the King’s plate and treasure with so many people in and out who were not under his orders. It was really not safe, he said; it was absolutely essential that he should have the whole set of lodgings to himself. So out went the Queen’s Household, and the Keeper and all his officers were installed in a compact and unassailable mass.