The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (20 page)

Parliament's view that the Crown Jewels had become wholly redundant naturally hardened after the execution of Charles I in Whitehall in January 1649. England would become a republic and therefore no fit place for such regal paraphernalia. On 9 August that year, the House of Commons ordered that

those Gentlemen who were appointed by this House, to have the
custody of the regalia, do deliver them over unto the trustees for [the] sale of the goods of the late king, queen, and prince, who are to cause the same to be totally broken.

And that they melt down the gold and silver of them; and to sell the jewels for the best advantage of the Commonwealth; and to take the like care of those that are in the Tower.
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All proceeds from the sale were to go towards funding new warship construction and to contribute to the burgeoning operational costs of the Commonwealth navy.

Chief among this regalia was the crown of St Edward the Confessor, king and saint, who occupied the throne of England in 1042–66. At the Reformation in the sixteenth century, its name became politically inexpedient, so it was artfully changed to Alfred the Great's crown', with not even a nod towards historical veracity. The collection also included an Anglo-Saxon comb and the eleventh-century crown of Queen Edith, the wife of St Edward, both probably recovered down the centuries from royal graves inside the Abbey. Precious metal from the crowns were sent to the once Royal Mint inside the walls of the Tower to be melted down and turned into coinage. Other items were sold to the highest bidder.

As far as Parliament was concerned, the most valuable item was the Tudor state crown made for Henry VII's coronation in 1485, which was decorated with twenty-eight diamonds, nineteen sapphires, thirty-seven rubies and 168 pearls. Its disposal raised the sum of £1,100 – or £128,000 at today's prices.

The only pieces that escaped this sale of the seventeenth century were a gold ampulla which contained the holy oil used to anoint the sovereign during the coronation service (first used when Henry IV was crowned in 1399) and a thirteenth-century silver gilt spoon, traditionally used in the same religious ceremony.
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After the demise of the Commonwealth and the reinstitution of the monarchy, new regalia was required for the coronation of Charles II on 23 April 1661. In June the following year, the Treasury (always tardy payers) paid Sir Robert Viner (whom we last met pursuing the assailants of the Duke of Ormond) for a new
set of Crown Jewels and other regal accoutrements to the tune of £31,978, 9s 11d, of which just over £12,000 was for the coronation regalia.
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These included two ‘Imperial Crowns' set with precious stones, one again called St Edward's Crown ‘wherewith the king was to be crowned and the other to be [worn] after his coronation before his majesty's return to Westminster Hall', according to a description drawn up by Sir Edward Walker, Garter Principal King at Arms.
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This second ‘Imperial State Crown' was adorned by the so-called ‘Black Prince's Ruby', a bead-shaped spinel weighing 170 carats (34g) – or about the size of a chicken egg.
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Among other new items were a gold orb, topped by a cross and set with precious stones, three sceptres, a ruby ring and a pair of golden spurs.
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After all this expenditure, arrangements had to be made for the proper safekeeping of the Crown Jewels. As we saw earlier, in previous reigns, the coronation regalia had been kept at Westminster Abbey, but the state regalia and other jewels were stored in the Tower. In 1508, Henry VII created a safe repository attached to the south side of the central White Tower and this facility was rebuilt by his son Henry VIII in 1535 with stout iron bars fitted to its windows for additional security. In 1668, the buildings attached to the White Tower began to be demolished as the smoke and sparks from their chimneys were thought to endanger the huge quantities of gunpowder stored in the massive keep or citadel.
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But now the security of the Crown Jewels had been dramatically reduced, perhaps in the fallacious belief that no patriotic Briton could ever dare touch the sacred crown of the newly restored sovereign, but more likely because of Charles II's perennial impecuniosity.

Meanwhile, Sir Gilbert Talbot – the same loyal Royalist who later unsuccessfully sought Thomas Blood's attainted estates following the attempt on Dublin Castle – had returned to England from exile impoverished and landless. Like so many others faithful to the Stuart crown, not unreasonably he cherished high expectations of receiving ‘fortune and favour' from the new king after his lean years of steadfast but unpaid service as a gentleman usher of the privy chamber at the exiled royal court established in France
and the Netherlands. With Ormond's assistance, he sought a sinecure appointment from Charles II and was delighted to be made master and treasurer of the Jewel House soon after the Restoration.

From 1669, the Crown Jewels were kept in the three-storey Irish Tower (now called the Martin Tower), built in 1238–72 on the north-east corner of the Tower of London's inner curtain wall and topped by its own ramparts and the leads of the roof. In the past it had been used as a prison, housing one poor insomniac in Elizabeth's reign who slept ‘but ten hours in seven weeks' and an unfortunate inmate called Heywood, who ‘strained himself so much with immoderate laughing that he bled thirty ounces of blood'.
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One wonders what he found so amusing.

Another prisoner was Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, popularly nicknamed the ‘wizard earl' because of his outlandish scientific experiments and bizarre interests in alchemy. He spent seventeen years in the Martin Tower because of suspicions of his involvement in the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but his incarceration was enlivened by an active social life within the precincts of the fortress. He even had a wooden indoor bowling alley built alongside the semicircular tower to help idle away a few of the tedious hours of his imprisonment.
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Talbot's official lodgings there unfortunately fell far short of his expectations or the trappings he perceived to be associated with his new status at the royal court. The master's rooms in the Martin Tower were ‘two ill chambers above stairs and the passage to them [was] dark at noon day', and Talbot scornfully described the dining room below as a ‘kind of wild barn without any covering except rafters'. He decided to appoint Talbot Edwards, a seventy-seven-year-old former retainer of his father's, as an assistant keeper to live there in his place, and he gratefully decamped to more salubrious accommodation in the rambling Palace of Whitehall. Apart from his advanced years, the trustworthy old soldier's credentials were impeccable for the awesome responsibility of the post.

Edwards, his wife and daughter Elizabeth thus became happy residents of the still uncomfortable and inconvenient Martin Tower. His son Wythe had been serving overseas for some years
as a soldier under Sir John Talbot in Flanders and his wife had moved in with the family.
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A plan drawn in 1702 by military engineers shows the tower's layout as it was in Edwards' time there in 1668. The dining room was on the first floor, with a closet and a cupboard provided within the massive curved stone walls and with narrow stairs climbing up from the ground floor. Off this room was the ‘Little Parlour' and a very awkwardly shaped kitchen with a cooking range. Across the landing was a one-seat lavatory. Outside was a two-storey wooden shed with a flight of stairs leading up to a gallery, probably the rotting remains of Northumberland's old bowling alley.
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The royal regalia were stored in a recess constructed in the thickness of the wall of a room on the basement floor. Only two hinged and cross-wired doors, opening outwards, provided any modicum of security. For the last ten years, when displaying the regalia to visitors, Talbot Edwards was in the habit of standing behind these doors to prevent anyone touching the crowns.
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There was just one door into the Crown Jewels chamber from the Tower's inner ward – and no sentry was ever stationed there to guard the entrance.

Although the assistant keeper's position was salaried, Edwards failed for years to persuade the penurious Exchequer to allow him to draw one penny of it, the officials claiming that the appointment was purely a private one and nothing to do with government.
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Furthermore, Sir Gilbert found that as some of the recognised perquisites of the job were no longer available, he was ‘not able to allow him a competent wage'.
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As some small measure of recompense, Charles II munificently allowed Edwards to exhibit the Crown Jewels to curious tourists, ‘charging such fees as each visitor might be inclined to pay'. As far as Charles was concerned, there was nothing wrong with private enterprise; it cost the king nothing and encouraged tourists to visit. Charging such ‘admission fees' turned out to be a lucrative business: Sir Gilbert was offered ‘five hundred old broad pieces of gold' for the position of assistant keeper when Edwards eventually died.
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Visiting the Tower to see the Crown Jewels was not a new practice. The state regalia had been occasionally exhibited to the
tax-paying public from the Middle Ages and such events were recorded in the early seventeenth century. It was only after the regalia were moved to the Martin Tower in 1669 that this was made a regular attraction, available to casual visitors.
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Thus, all the elements of a potential crime of huge magnitude had fallen neatly into place like the tumblers of a lock securing a safe.

Only an old man was responsible for the safeguarding of the nation's Crown Jewels. There was little or no security within their repository. The Tower was an established tourist venue – drawing visitors to the Royal Menagerie within its walls
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as well as to see the Crown Jewels. Therefore, the regalia were subject to regular access by strangers seeking to examine and perhaps even handle them after an appropriate tip was proffered. The Tower itself had an unenviable reputation during this period for the apparent ease with which prisoners could escape. Its permanent residents included many civilians, male and female, who passed through its gates with little hindrance, as did their friends. Anyone could walk in and out practically unchallenged by the sentries, who were drawn from the battalion of the King's Guards permanently based in the fortress.

For someone who craved public notoriety, the Crown Jewels seemed an irresistible temptation. That man, inevitably, was Colonel Thomas Blood.

His contemporary biographer wrote soon after his death that, faced with his continued financial problems, ‘one project yet remained which he was certain would either make or mar him':

If he escaped, he thought himself made. If he failed in the attempt, he knew that the enterprise would make such a noise in the world that he was sure to be another Herostratus
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and to live in story for the strangeness, if not the success of his attempts and to make himself whole by the spoils of the English crown.
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Despite its many shortcomings in security, the reputation of the Tower of London as a royal citadel would daunt any common
burglar contemplating committing a felony within the twelve acres (4.86 hectares) encompassed by its substantial high walls. One would believe that the audacity and sheer effrontery of such a crime as stealing the Crown Jewels would deter even the most ambitious of thieves. But for a daredevil adventurer like Blood, ever the bold and resourceful soldier of fortune, ready to exploit any opportunity and brave in its execution, here was a golden chance to make money and to cock an impudent snook at government and the establishment. The colonel believed he would succeed where others must inevitably fail – a case perhaps of ‘who dares, wins'. In any case, ‘impossible' was a word he failed to countenance in any of his exploits. Others, less charitably, might see his inherent reckless daring as just insane egotism.

Blood gathered together a small team of trusted individuals for the enterprise, most of them wanted men, still on the run from the Ormond attack of the previous December. His highwayman son, of course, was included, as was Richard Halliwell, and possibly Lieutenant Colonel William Moore, although the precise role of the latter is far from clear. A newcomer to Blood's escapades was the Fifth Monarchist preacher Captain Robert Perrot, a one-time parliamentary lieutenant in Major General Thomas Harrison's regiment
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and now a silk-dyer of Thames Street, immediately west of the Tower of London. Blood had known him earlier when he played a role in several of the apparently interminable nonconformist conspiracies against the crown in London. William Smith, another Fifth Monarchist, was recruited to act as horse-minder or ‘scout' for the group's escape.
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A further accomplice was later named as Ralph Alexander, a brewer who was implicated in the notorious Rathbone plot against the king in April 1666, but there seems no evidence to support these suspicions.
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In mid-April 1671, Blood arrived at the Tower ostensibly to view the Crown Jewels like any other innocent tourist up from the country, curious to see the fabulous sights of London. He was disguised as a parson, wearing ‘a long cloak, cassock and canonical girdle' and employing the familiar alias of ‘Dr Ayliff'.
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His biographer provides more information about this disguise as a doctor of divinity: ‘a little band [at the throat] a
long false beard, a cap with ears . . . and a cloak'.
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Accompanying him was his respectable-looking ‘wife', equally excited to have sight of the famous regalia. In reality, she was an imposter in more ways than one: his wife Mary was lying ill at her old family home in Lancashire
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and so Blood had hired a young Irish actress called Jenny Blaine to take her place.
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