It is of polished rock crystal, has rounded ends with a red and yellow gold laurel leaf, is tied in a bow knot with a red-gold ribbon and has a drop pendant consisting of one brilliant and four mounted rose diamonds, set in silver.

The gift came in a box, with its customary Faberge Cyrillic markings and an assay mark of 1899-1908.

In wider Faberge terms, the present was commissioned in the year of the Imperial Cuckoo Egg, which was given by Tsar Nicholas II to Tsarina Alexandra in 1900.

The Tsarinas gift to Miss Jackson was a paper-knife by Faberge.

It was donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2017.

Alexandra referred to the year in a postcard greeting from Spala, the imperial hunting lodge in Poland to a friend, as What terrible sorrows this year has brought us.

The year 1900 had brought with it the deaths of three of the Tsarinas uncles, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who died on 30 July 1900 at Schloss Ehrenburg in Coburg and two paternal uncles Prince Heinrich of Hesse and Prince Wilhelm of Hesse.

Tsar Nicholas II had fallen ill with typhoid the disease which caused the death of her maternal grandfather, Prince Albert and also threatened the life of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII in 1871.

On the return to health of the Tsar, Princess Bariatinsky and two other ladies presented the Tsarina with an ikon, for which she wrote a letter of thanks on New Years Eve 1900, echoing the sentiments of her postcard from Spala: Dearest Mary what sorrows this last year brought us.

At the time, Queen Victoria had demanded regular and detailed monthly reports from Miss Jackson as to every particular of the education of her Hessian grandchildren, for whom she felt doubly responsible since the death of her their mother, her second daughter Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse in 1878.

Jackson was present at the Hessian familys last holiday together in the summer of 1878, when she was a member of the suite which went with the ducal family to Eastbourne.

She is captured as part of the large group in the photographs made at the Eastbourne villa of the Duke of Devonshire, Compton Place.

When she had been in the service of the Hessian ducal family for ten years, Miss Jackson received a bracelet of miniatures of Princess Alice and her children as an acknowledgement.

Miss Jackson left the service of the Hessian ducal family in 1887 when Alexandra was aged fifteen.

The Tsarina wrote to Jackson from Balmoral in 1896, during the Russian imperial visit to Queen Victoria, sending the letter to London, not knowing your Eastbourne address.

In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Imperial Familys removal to Tobolsk in Siberia, it was the imperial childrens English tutor Sydney Gibbes, who chose to write a letter ostensibly harmless, but on closer inspection a desperate cry for help to Jackson, whom he had never met in England.

The letter contained talkative references to the life that the Imperial Family led in Siberia but made careful uses of private names which Miss Jackson would have understood.

It asked after Davids father and mother which actually meant an enquiry about the Prince of Wales and his parents, King George V and Queen Mary.

The author Charlotte Zeepvat concludes that the truth gives the most simple, tragic reason for this 82-year-old Jackson was by then ill.

Zeepvat theorises if the letter which left Tobolsk on 15 December 1917 had reached Miss Jackson, she would have been beyond taking any necessary action that could have helped the situation.

A gold-mounted nephrite paper-knife probably Russian, late 19th-century and apparently unmarked, with a facsimile inscription For my darling Papa from his loving Alix appeared at Christies in 2010, thought to be a gift from Alexandra when Princess of Hesse to her father, Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse.

It also has a small, gold-mounted white enamel egg and was made by Faberge, St Petersburg.

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