Ebba's Engagement Ring

One of Sweden’s most well-known love couples was King Gustavus Adolphus and Countess Ebba Brahe. The King proposed to Ebba Brahe sometime in the beginning of 1613 and they both hoped that their parents would accept the alliance. However, the Dowager Queen Kristina and Count Magnus Brahe considered the difference in social standing was too great and the engagement was broken off.

The memory of this alliance, nipped in the bud, is kept in two pieces of jewellery: the Brahe necklace and the “engagement ring”. Modern scholars have dismissed the ring as genuine because of its style; the ring is now said to be from the mid-18th Century. There are no ways of telling, though, if the stone itself was previously set in another ring, that may or may not have belonged to Ebba Brahe.