The Rose Glasses
The dearest aim of every collector of old wine glasses is to come upon a Jacobite glass. The more sanguine and less strict kind of collector declares himself the owner of a Jacobite example if he possesses a glass engraved with a six-petalled heraldic Stuart rose (one petal for each King or Queen of Stuart blood who actually reigned in England, he says), a large bud (representing the Old Pretender, he explains), a smaller bud (for the Young Pretender), and a bird or (see, page 20) butterfly (crossing the narrow seas, he explains, to bring the Stuarts back).
A stricter, less easily satisfied collector points out that those were “the ordinary rose glasses,” used at all fashionable dinner-tables in the eighteenth century (see, page 59). The reply to that is that the six-petalled rose and one of the buds, at least, are heraldic, not naturally represented; that the heraldic, six-petalled white rose was the Stuart rose; and that, at any rate, the “ordinary rose glasses” were sometimes used by Jacobites, particularly in general assemblies, because of their covert meaning, when it would have been unsafe to use the treasonable Jacobite glasses proper. A slight addition to the rose glass makes it truly Jacobite; thus I own a fine goblet which is made Jacobite by a monk’s-hood flower being added—a reference to General Monk. An “ordinary rose glass”—not so ordinary after all, and difficult to procure now, as well as dear to buy—which has a Stuart emblem engraved under the foot of it is allowed to pass muster by the stricter collector, but what he aims at or boasts of if he possesses one is a “Jacobite glass proper.”