The Parson Who Tried to Steal the Crown

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Early on a May morning in 1671, an old man at the Tower of London unlocked a room to show some visitors the crown of England. One of them was a parson he had come to think of as a friend. Within minutes the old man was on the floor with a cloak over his head, and the parson was beating the crown flat with a wooden mallet so it would fit under his coat. Today: Colonel Thomas Blood, the man who came closest to stealing the Crown Jewels, and the king who forgave him.

Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into Restoration London, where a king's new jewels could be seen by anyone who paid the keeper.

In 1671 the jewels were barely ten years old. After Charles the First was executed, Oliver Cromwell had the old regalia broken up as emblems of the "detestable rule of kings," the gems sold and the gold melted into coins. When Charles the Second took the throne, a new set had to be made for his coronation.

They were kept in the Martin Tower, in the care of the deputy keeper, Talbot Edwards, who lived in the rooms above with his wife and daughter. Edwards was close to eighty. The king allowed members of the public to see the regalia, and the keeper collected the viewing fees. So a well-mannered visitor was no threat to Talbot Edwards. Visitors were how he made his living.

In the spring of 1671 one arrived dressed as a country clergyman, in band and gown, with a woman he introduced as his wife. During the visit she was taken ill, and Mrs. Edwards brought her upstairs into the family's rooms and gave her a cordial. A few days later the parson came back with gloves for Mrs. Edwards, a present from his grateful wife. The families grew friendly. The parson mentioned a nephew with a country estate. Wouldn't he make a fine match for the Edwards girl? A day was set for the young people to meet. At dinner the parson said a very long grace, and he offered to buy a pair of pistols hanging in the parlour.

The parson was Thomas Blood, and he was one of the most wanted men in the three kingdoms. Blood was an Irish Protestant, a blacksmith's son, who had sided with Parliament and lost his Irish land when the king came back. In 1663 he helped plan a rising to seize Dublin Castle and the king's governor there, the Duke of Ormond. The plot was betrayed and Blood disappeared. And the winter before he met the Edwards family, a gang seized the Duke of Ormond from his coach on a London street at night. Blood was behind that too.

On the morning of May the ninth, early, five men rode up to the Tower. Two stayed with the horses. The parson brought his companions to the jewel house, one of them presented as the nephew. While the ladies got ready upstairs, would Mr. Edwards show his friends the crown? He unlocked the room.

Once the door was shut, they threw a cloak over the old man's head and forced a wooden plug into his mouth, tied behind his neck. Edwards struggled anyway. They struck him on the head with the mallet and stabbed him in the belly, and he lay still.

Then came the moment all the gloves and grace and matchmaking had been building toward. Blood took up the crown and brought the mallet down on it, crushing the arches so it would lie flat under his clerical coat. A man named Robert Perrot pushed the orb down the front of his breeches. A third began filing the long sceptre in two, because it would not fit in their bag.

That was when their luck ran out. Edwards's son Wythe, a soldier just home from Flanders, turned up at the door in the middle of the robbery. The thieves ran, leaving the half-cut sceptre behind. On the floor, the old keeper worked the gag loose and shouted, "Treason! Murder! The crown is stolen!"

The chase ran along the Tower wharf. Blood fired at a guard and missed. Wythe's brother-in-law, Captain Beckman, caught him near the Iron Gate, and in the struggle the crown fell out from under his coat, shedding stones. Perrot was taken with the orb. Blood's own son was thrown from his horse in a lane nearby and captured too. In the story told afterward, Blood looked at the men holding him and said, "It was a gallant attempt, however unsuccessful. It was for a crown."

This was treason, punishable by hanging, drawing and quartering. Blood said he would answer to no one but the king, and the king agreed to see him. Charles questioned him with his brother James and Prince Rupert present. Blood admitted everything, boasted about the attack on Ormond, and refused to name an accomplice. He told the king he had once taken aim at him while he bathed in the Thames near Battersea, and had been stopped by "an awe of Majesty."

On the first of August 1671, Thomas Blood received a royal pardon for every treason, murder, assault and felony he had committed since the king's return. With it came Irish lands worth five hundred pounds a year. Ormond, asked not to prosecute, replied that the king's command was reason enough.

Nobody knows exactly why Charles did it. The diarist John Evelyn, who later found himself at the same dinner table as Blood, wrote that he could never understand it. He wrote that Blood had "a villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating," and suspected he had become a spy among the religious radicals. That much came true. Blood spent his remaining years passing information to the king's ministers, a familiar face at court. Perhaps Charles was buying a useful man. Perhaps he simply enjoyed him.

Talbot Edwards recovered, slowly. The king promised his family a reward, but the money was slow in coming, and the old man sold his claim for half its value in cash. He died in 1674 and was buried in the Tower's chapel. The poet Andrew Marvell joked that Blood's layman's pity had beaten him: in sparing the keeper's life, he lost the prize. "With the priest's vestments had he but put on a bishop's cruelty," Marvell wrote, "the crown was gone."

Blood died in Westminster in August 1680. Rumor said the funeral was one last trick, so the body was dug up, and an inquest confirmed it was him.

After that morning in 1671, the Crown Jewels were kept under armed guard. Visitors still pay to see them. They no longer get invited upstairs for a cordial.