Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (60 page)

Pedro’s sadism disgusted the chivalrous English prince, and he sought to divest himself of this unwelcome friend. A genuine breakdown of his health gave him the excuse he needed to go, but Pedro was short of cash to pay the prince off for restoring him to his throne. Pedro had shown the prince his proudest possession – the bulbous, blood-red spinel. He had acquired the jewel, he bragged, by typically foul means. Originally it had been in the possession of Abu Said, a Moorish prince of Granada. Pedro had lured Abu Said to Seville, killed his servants, and then treacherously murdered his guest with his own hands, finding the stone in the dead man’s clothes. Now the Black Prince demanded – and got – the stone as the price for his help.

But the bloodstained stone did not bring the prince good fortune. Never recovering his broken health, he died in 1376 before inheriting his father’s throne. He left the spinel as his legacy. We next hear of the jewel at Agincourt, adorning the battle helmet of Henry V. At the height of the battle, in single combat with the Duc d’Alençon, Henry received a tremendous blow from d’Alençon’s sword which dented the helmet. The jewel, however, survived, and may even have deflected d’Alençon’s almost deadly blow. Reputedly worn by Richard III in his crown at another battle, Bosworth in 1485, it did not bring that murderous monarch the luck that Henry had enjoyed. The crown, with its spinel, as legend has it, rolled under a hawthorn bush just as Richard succumbed to his enemies and went down crying, ‘Treason!’ Retrieved by Lord Stanley, it was placed on the head of the new king, Henry VII, inaugurator of the Tudor dynasty.

The spinel continued to be the chief adornment of the crowns of England’s kings and queens until the grand destruction of the Crown jewels under Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. When the great state crown itself was broken up, the spinel was saved and sold – for what was even then the derisory sum of £4 – to a secret Royalist sympathiser who carefully preserved it until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The spinel, too, was then proudly restored to its rightful place at the front centre of the king’s state crown. This skilled job was the work of Charles’s court jeweller, Sir Robert Vyner. To emphasise the continuity of monarchy, Vyner was told to make the new jewels as much like the destroyed originals as possible. Fortunately, detailed records survived in the Tower, enabling
Vyner to reconstruct the regalia. The work cost Charles the substantial sum of £32,000.

Money was always a problem for the Merry Monarch. He was generous with his promises to courtiers, supporters and mistresses; but the pensions that he lavished on so many were all too often in arrears – or never paid at all. The keeper of the restored Crown jewels during his reign, Sir Gilbert Talbot, was one of the favoured few who was exceptionally well remunerated for his duties. Allocated an annual salary of £50, Talbot had his own rent-free grace and favour apartment at the Tower, and the choice of rooms in other royal palaces too. He also received food amounting to ‘fourteen double dishes per diem’. On top of all this he got a cut of £300 from the King’s New Year’s Gift money – a sort of tax on the nobility in the form of a cash ‘gift’ levied on the lords and paid to the king, that Talbot was responsible for collecting. He received another £300 annually in tips from foreign ambassadors to whom he presented gifts from the king. And as if all this was not enough to support a comfortable lifestyle, Talbot also creamed off a hefty £800 in sweeteners from the silversmiths and goldsmiths whom he favoured to execute royal commissions. The perks of his job also entitled Talbot to a closed cart for carrying his goods around; his own coronation robes; and the right to precede all the judges of the land in formal processions. As the cherry on his cake, Talbot alone had the singular honour of placing and removing Charles’s crown on the king’s head whenever he was required to wear it.

Gilbert Talbot’s assistant keeper at the Tower, coincidentally named Talbot Edwards, was not nearly as well-off as his boss. Since Gilbert preferred the more commodious surroundings of Whitehall Palace to the Tower as his chief residence, it fell to Edwards to live permanently on site in the Tower. At the Restoration, the remade Crown jewels had been given a new home in the Martin Tower in the north-eastern corner of the fortress. Edwards and his wife and daughter literally lived over the shop – occupying the top floors of the tower immediately above the Jewel House, which was in a fortified basement vault. Edwards officially drew a state salary, but since he was lower down the pecking order than Gilbert Talbot, his wages were years in arrears – and since Edwards in 1671 was seventy-seven it appeared unlikely that he would ever see his money. He relied instead on the fees he charged visitors who came to see the jewels. He did not know it, but he was about to entertain the most singular visitor that the jewels would ever receive.

* * *

Thomas Blood, or ‘Colonel’ Blood as he is known to posterity (he constantly promoted himself and never actually rose above the rank of lieutenant), was not only the most celebrated jewel thief in history, but one of the most outlandish, outrageous and above all lucky rogues never to swing from a gibbet. His life story reads like a piece of far-fetched fiction from the pen of a Defoe or a Fielding, but it is well-documented reality.

Blood was born into a family of English Protestant settlers in County Meath, Ireland, in about 1618. His father – also named Thomas Blood – though a humble blacksmith, owned some 230 acres around Sarney, his notorious son’s birthplace. The privileged position Protestants enjoyed is also reflected in the ironic fact that his son – an infamous outlaw if ever there was one – was appointed a magistrate at the tender age of twenty-one.

Soon afterwards, in 1641, the simmering tension between Catholic and Protestant communities exploded into violence when the Catholics rose in rebellion. Hundreds of Protestants were massacred; thousands more were driven from their homes to take shelter in the capital, Dublin, held for King Charles I by the moderate Anglican Protestant James Butler, Duke of Ormonde. English politics were also reaching boiling point. The Westminster Parliament was increasingly in opposition to King Charles I’s high-handed attempts to impose his Anglo-Catholic, high church beliefs on the English Church and rule without parliamentary approval. In 1642 these strains led to the outbreak of the English Civil War.

Urgently needing troops to support his cause, Charles ordered Ormonde to reach a truce with the Irish rebels. Blood, a militant Protestant Nonconformist, switched support from king to Parliament. It also marked the beginning of a lifelong grudge that he held against Ormonde, whom he saw as a traitor to the Protestant cause. Blood came to England, joined the Parliamentary army, and married Mary, the daughter of a landed Lancashire family.

Blood settled into domestic life with Mary and their growing family. But Cromwell’s death in 1658 changed everything for Blood. Bold and adventurous, he refused to accept the return of the monarchy. He was deeply involved in several Republican plots and risings – one aimed at seizing the Tower – in London in the 1660s, but, showing an extraordinary talent for escapology which would stand him in good stead throughout his life, managed to evade arrest.

Blood sank into the murky depths of London’s political and criminal underworld. Under a variety of aliases, and in a bewildering array of disguises – the canonical robes of priests and minsters were his favourite costume – he flitted between ill-lit inns and basement cellars where spies, government provocateurs, religious maniacs, pimps, prostitutes and thieves mingled. In such a shady world it was difficult to tell a principled plotter from a treacherous rogue or government plant, but Blood took to it as to the manner born.

In July 1667, Blood executed an audacious coup. Hearing that one of his former co-conspirators, a Captain John Mason, who had been held in the Tower since the failure of an anti-government plot in 1663, was being transferred to York for trial and probably execution, he resolved to rescue him. Travelling north in Mason’s party was one William Leving, a former rebel who had turned king’s evidence, and was due to testify against Mason at his trial. Blood organised a daring ambush to save Mason and silence Leving for good. When the prisoners and their escort paused at an inn near Doncaster, Blood sprang his ambush. Despite falling from his horse three times, and sustaining a sword thrust through his arm, Blood won the fracas that followed, and managed to grab Mason from his guards’ clutches and get clean away. In the confusion, Leving escaped; he lay low, only to be found poisoned in his jail cell in York a short time later, a killing probably arranged by the Duke of Buckingham – Blood’s principal patron in the governing class.

Buckingham was also behind Blood’s next audacious crime: the attempted abduction in 1570 of his old enemy, the Duke of Ormonde, who was ambushed by Blood’s gang while driving in his carriage in the middle of London. Although the duke managed to escape his kidnappers, it was a very near thing. The outrageous Buckingham, a strong anti-Catholic, used Blood as a hitman to carry out crimes that he did not wish to sully his own hands with. The strong suspicion must be that Buckingham – who had himself survived four terms of imprisonment in the Tower – was also behind Blood’s next, and even more sensational crime: the theft of the Crown jewels.

Sometime in the early spring of 1671, just weeks after the abortive abduction of Ormonde, Talbot Edwards, Assistant Keeper of the Jewels, received an unusual visitor at the Tower. The man was dressed as a clergyman of the Church of England, appeared to be about fifty years old, and had
fierce, penetrating eyes above a hawkish Roman nose with a notable scar (a relic of Blood’s rescue of John Mason). Although the cleric’s appearance was slightly outlandish – he sported a long beard, a cassock and cloak, and a cap with ‘ears’ – Edwards, scenting a fee, was only too happy to show the reverend gentleman and the lady accompanying him – whom he introduced as his wife – the jewels in his care.

Edwards led the odd couple to the basement of the Martin Tower, unlocked the reinforced door, and let them into the vault where the jewels were kept behind a metal grille in a cupboard inside a recess in the thick walls. As Blood greedily feasted his eyes on the glittering regalia, his ‘wife’ – in reality a hired actress named Jenny Blaine – apparently overcome by the sight, proved her theatrical skills by staging a fainting fit, or in Edwards’ words, complained of ‘a qualm upon her stomack’. The old gentleman hurried away to fetch a reviving glass of water, leaving Blood to case the joint. Jenny, invited to rest in the Edwards family’s apartment, made a rapid recovery. As she did so, Blood took the opportunity to strike up an intimacy with the assistant keeper and his wife – and returned a few days later, still in his clergyman’s garb, with a gift of gloves as a token of appreciation for their kindness.

Blood now began an intensive campaign of ‘grooming’ the elderly couple and their unmarried daughter – a softening-up process for the crime he was planning. After several visits, the relationship had progressed far enough for Blood to advance a typically bold proposal. He had, he said, a very eligible nephew and he could not help noticing the wondrous beauty of the Edwardses’ spinster daughter Elizabeth. Would it not be a fine thing, he asked, if the young people were joined in holy matrimony? And, naturally, he added, he would conduct the ceremony for the happy couple. The Edwardses were overwhelmed by this generous offer to take their daughter off their hands, particularly after Blood threw in the information that his nephew had a couple of hundred acres of good land in Ireland. A celebratory dinner was held in the Martin Tower to formalise the betrothal, at which the clergyman offered fervent prayers for the well-being of the royal family. Afterwards Edwards gave his guest a detailed tour of the Tower, and even sold him a pair of pistols that Blood had admired. Having thus neatly disarmed his ‘mark’ both literally and metaphorically, and thoroughly reconnoitred the scene of the coming crime, Blood departed to make final preparations for his heist.

He had arranged to bring his ‘nephew’ to meet the Edwardses at the
Martin Tower on 9 May 1671 – at seven in the morning – an hour when the Tower was unlikely to be crowded. He kept the appointment, accompanied by his criminal son, Thomas Blood junior, a professional highwayman, who was playing the part of the nephew under the alias ‘Tom Hunt’. Also in the party were two regular members of Blood’s gang, Robert Perrot, a fierce Baptist and former Parliamentarian trooper turned silk dyer, and Robert Halliwell, who was to act as lookout man. All were armed to the teeth with concealed pistols, stiletto daggers and swordsticks. A fourth member of the gang, William Smith, a Fifth Monarchist sect stalwart, remained outside the Tower walls as ‘getaway driver’ – he was holding their horses. Halliwell hung around outside the Martin Tower, trying not to look furtive, while the Bloods,
père et fils
, went inside with Perrot. Elizabeth Edwards, eager to see her fiancé, but shy of making a premature appearance, sent her maid to take a peek. The maid saw Halliwell at the door of the tower, assumed he was her mistress’s intended, and returned to make her report.

Meanwhile, inside the Tower, after making the introductions, Blood suggested that while they awaited the arrival of Mrs Edwards and her daughter – still at their toilette in an upper room – Mr Edwards could show the jewels to the ‘nephew’ and Perrot. Once again thinking of his fee, the old man readily agreed, and led the Bloods and Perrot below. As soon as Edwards had unlocked the door and admitted the trio to the Jewel House, he was set upon as he bent to lock the door behind them. A cloak was thrown over his head, and a pre-fashioned gag – a plug of wood with an air hole drilled through it – was thrust into his mouth and secured with a leather thong. Immediately Edwards began to struggle frantically. His assailants told him that if he kept still his life would be spared. Undaunted, the brave old man continued to attempt to fight free of the cloak enveloping him. The ruthless Blood produced a wooden mallet and bludgeoned Edwards to the ground. But the keeper continued to kick, struggle and gurgle, and so Blood stabbed him in the stomach with a long stiletto knife.