Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (61 page)

Leaving Edwards for dead, the gang set about their task. Blood removed the metal grille and flattened the king’s state crown with his mallet. This made it easier to carry it off in a bag he wore under his cassock. Young Blood started to saw the long sceptre in half with a file so he could carry it away; while Perrot hid the heavy orb in his breeches. The blows of Blood’s mallet dislodged some of the jewels encrusting the crown,
including the Black Prince’s famous ‘ruby’. As Blood scrabbled on the floor after the precious stones there was an unwelcome interruption.

It was exactly at this moment that the Edwardses’ long-lost son, Wythe – who had been in Flanders fighting as a soldier for the last ten years – returned to witness his sister’s betrothal. Edwards junior passed Halliwell at the door, identified himself, and went upstairs to greet his mother and sister. Halliwell hurried down to the Jewel House to let his companions in crime know what was afoot. With no time to complete the sawing in half of the sceptre, the jewel thieves hastily made off with only the crown and orb, leaving the rod lying on the floor.

As soon as they had gone, old Talbot Edwards, miraculously still alive, with a superhuman effort managed to spit his gag out and shout, ‘Treason! Murder! The crown is stolen!’ at the top of his voice. Hearing his cries, his daughter rushed downstairs to find her father in a pool of blood. She followed the thieves’ trail across the courtyard between the Martin and White Towers and took up her father’s cries, wailing, ‘Treason! The crown is stolen!’ Hearing his sister’s shouts, young Wythe Edwards emerged from the Martin Tower, accompanied by a Captain Marcus Beckman, a military friend of his who had also been invited to witness Miss Edwards’ betrothal. The fit young soldiers gave chase across the courtyard. Beckman, a Swedish-born military engineer and soldier of fortune, was already familiar with the Tower, having once been imprisoned there as a suspected spy.

In the short time the two soldiers took to catch up with the thieves, young Blood and Halliwell had passed through the Byward and Middle Towers, reached their horses and were about to mount and ride away. Blood himself, and Perrot, weighed down with their loot, had just passed under the archway of the Bloody Tower and turned right into Water Lane, heading towards the Byward Tower and the exit. Seeing them about to escape, Edwards and Beckman shouted to the Yeoman Warder manning the drawbridge over the moat between the Byward and Middle towers to stop the thieves. As he attempted to do so, Blood drew a pistol and fired, causing the warder – wisely but not heroically – to hit the deck. A second warder at the Middle Tower also let discretion play the better part of valour and allowed the two miscreants to escape. If Blood and Perrot had turned right up Tower Hill, they might have got clean away with their booty, but instead, closely pursued, they decided to try to lose themselves in the early-morning crowds thronging the riverside wharves.

They swerved sharp left and ran along the quays. But the two soldiers, younger and fitter men, were fast gaining on them. Blood resorted to the old ploy of yelling, ‘Stop thief!’ as he ran, pointing to his two pursuers. Momentarily fooled, some upstanding citizens laid hands on Edwards and Beckman, but the deception did not last long, and the chase continued. In the confusion, both Bloods and Perrot managed to reach their horses held by Smith at the Iron Gate and were in the act of mounting, when their persistent pursuers finally caught up with them. Blood fired the second of the pistols he was carrying at Beckman, but missed, and after a grim struggle, during which some of the jewels fell from his pockets, rolled off and were never seen again, both Blood and Perrot were subdued and arrested. The crown and orb – minus some missing stones – were repaired and restored to their rightful place. Blood’s son, whose horse had collided with a cart and thrown him during his hasty escape, was also detained; and Halliwell was picked up later. As he was led away Blood was philosophical, remarking, ‘It was a gallant deed, although it failed.’

Blood and his gang were imprisoned in – where else? – the Tower. They were held in the vaults beneath the White Tower – where prisoners had been tortured in Tudor times – to await the king’s pleasure. Few doubted that their fate would be the traditional terrible death meted out to traitors of hanging, drawing and quartering. The theft of the Crown jewels was not just any old jewel robbery. Taking the jewels with their sacral, religious symbolism was akin to kidnapping the monarch himself. But, astonishingly, this was not the punishment that awaited the notorious Thomas Blood. In fact, the abortive and bloody raid on the jewels was to be but the beginning of another stage in Blood’s amazing career. From being the Republican rebel and bold, buccaneering outlaw forever outwitting the state’s agents, Blood became one such agent himself. How did this transformation from poacher to gamekeeper come about?

The motivation behind Blood’s attempt to steal the jewels has been much debated. Though violent and ruthless, Blood was never a career criminal
per se
and despised his namesake son for being a common highwayman. Blood senior’s crimes – from a plot to seize Dublin Castle to the attempted abduction of the Duke of Ormonde – were of a different order. They always had a political and/or religious motive. If his aim was financial gain it is likely that he would have used any monies obtained to further the cause of Republican Nonconformism. It has also been plausibly
suggested that the raid was an ‘inside job’ organised with the knowledge and secret approval of the king himself, who – as ever – was chronically short of cash.

Charles’s actions after the crime were certainly suspicious. Blood remained remarkably calm in captivity, maintaining that he would only make a complete confession to the king himself. Although Blood was brought to Charles in irons and closely questioned by a royal inquisition, consisting of Charles, his brother James, and their cousin Prince Rupert, he was never executed, nor even punished, beyond his few weeks’ imprisonment in the Tower. Nor were any of his confederates. Even more astonishingly, Blood was actually
rewarded
by the king for his crime – receiving lands in his native Ireland, and a pension of £500 a year. Before bestowing this, the king laughingly asked Blood what he would do if granted mercy, and Blood, typically bold, replied, ‘I would endeavour to deserve it, sire.’ Cheekily, he added that Charles owed him his life, since in his Republican days, he had once stalked the king with a musket, intending to assassinate him. But, observing the king skinny-dipping in the Thames at Vauxhall, Blood, hiding in some nearby reeds, said he was so ‘awe-struck’ by the sight of his naked sovereign that he forebore to open fire.

Whatever his reasons – and they certainly do not bear much examination – Charles’s lenient treatment of Blood astonished his contemporaries. The diarist John Evelyn was staggered to see the jewel thief sitting at the treasury table at a dinner to honour a party of French noblemen soon after the heist:

Blood … that impudent bold fellow who had not long before attempted to steal the Imperial Crown itself out of the Tower … How came he to be pardoned, and even received into favour, not only after this, but several other exploits almost as daring both in Ireland and here, I could never come to understand … The only treason of this sort that was ever pardoned. The man had not only a daring but a villainous unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken and dangerously insinuating.

Whether Charles was moved merely by fellow feeling for a rascal like himself, or whether, more plausibly, Blood was acting as his agent when he raided the Tower, the fact is that Blood inexplicably escaped punishment and spent the rest of his murky life as a ‘cut-out’ link man between the government and his colleagues in the Nonconformist opposition. In
stark contrast, the victim of the crime – brave old Talbot Edwards – was treated less than generously. Although he recovered from the stabbing and battering, he became very infirm and applied for a pension – which was initially refused. Grudgingly, the government eventually granted it shortly before Edwards died. Elizabeth Edwards did find a husband as a direct result of that dramatic May morning, but it was not young Thomas Blood. The man she married was the gallant Captain Beckman, who was promoted major for his courage in capturing Blood. The old rogue himself lived on until 1680 when he died, in bed, aged sixty-two. Someone in a very high place had clearly been protecting Blood – but who?

Just as an earlier Duke of Buckingham has often been accused of being the evil genius behind Richard III’s crimes in the Tower, so Charles’s childhood companion, and crony in lechery, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, has been long suspected as the
éminence grise
behind Blood. We have already seen that Buckingham was widely suspected as the originator of Blood’s bold rescue of John Mason and his bid to kidnap Ormonde, against whom both he and Buckingham held grudges. Certainly, Ormonde’s son Lord Ossory publicly accused Buckingham of the crime – a grave charge that Buckingham, tellingly, failed to answer.

As a convinced anti-Catholic, the Duke sympathised with Blood’s Nonconformist religious stance, if not his Republican politics. Himself descended from royalty on his mother’s side, and brought up with Charles as a member of the royal family after his namesake father’s assassination, Buckingham had pretensions to succeed Charles’s himself, and even on his deathbed referred to himself as ‘a prince’. Finally, the course of his whole life shows that Buckingham was a killer quite capable of commissioning a grand larceny like the theft of the Crown jewels.

The archetypal Restoration rake, Buckingham’s own extraordinary career encompassed no fewer than three separate spells in the Tower. Still a baby when his father, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the highly unpopular favourite of both James I and Charles I, was murdered in 1628, the younger Buckingham and his siblings were brought up practically as the adopted children of Charles I, and childhood companions of the king’s own children. Buckingham was at Charles II’s side at the battle of Worcester and, like his friend, made a daring escape abroad after their
defeat. But he frequently fell out with Charles, and was more than ready to defy his royal friend and master.

Their first clash came in 1657 when Buckingham, having run out of cash in exile, despaired that the monarchy would ever be restored. He decided to desert Charles II in Holland and return to England to recover his vast estates, confiscated by Parliament after the Civil War. His lands in Yorkshire had been awarded to Lord General Thomas Fairfax, victorious commander of the New Model Army. Buckingham’s plan was awesome in its simplicity: a notable ladies’ man, he set about wooing Fairfax’s only child, Mary, a plain girl of nineteen, in order to get back his family estates by marrying her. Buckingham’s campaign scandalised both Royalists and Roundheads, but, astonishingly, it won over the people who mattered: the Fairfax family themselves. Mary fell head over heels for the rogue, breaking off her engagement to Lord Chesterfield in Buckingham’s favour, while even her hardbitten old soldier father was melted by his charm – and possibly the snobbish appeal of making his only daughter a duchess.

In September 1657 Buckingham married Mary Fairfax. Cromwell was incandescent with rage – particularly as Buckingham had bragged that if he failed with the Fairfaxes he would set his cap at one of the Lord Protector’s equally plain daughters! The duke was placed under house arrest in York House, his palatial London home in the Strand. Outraged at this insult to his family, Fairfax journeyed to London to plead his new son-in-law’s case. Ironsided as ever, Cromwell retorted that Fairfax should have consulted his old friends before agreeing to such a scandalous match. A furious Fairfax stormed out of the gallery in Whitehall Palace where the interview was being conducted. It was the last time that the two old Roundheads would meet.

Though supposedly confined to his mansion, Buckingham soon charmed his jailers into letting him leave his house on excursions. Cromwell decided that a more rigorous incarceration was needed. After Buckingham was arrested travelling incognito in Kent, he was sent to the Tower. However, his first confinement in the fortress was not to last long. Within a few days, Cromwell died on 3 September 1658. When Buckingham heard the news, as he recalled later:

… I was then close prisoner in the Tower, with a couple of guards lying always in my chamber and a sentinel at my door. I confess I was not a little delighted with the noise of the great guns, for I presently knew what
it meant, and if Oliver had lived for three days longer I had certainly been put to death.

The mournful boom of the cannon firing a tribute to the dead dictator did indeed sound a signal of freedom for the duke. Within days he was removed from the Tower to Windsor Castle, and the following February his father-in-law Lord Fairfax stood bail for him in the astronomical sum of £20,000. Pledging loyalty to Parliament, Buckingham was released by order of the House of Commons.

The duke’s second spell in the Tower was of even shorter duration. It came after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The king had magnanimously forgiven his errant friend for making his peace with Parliament. Charles and Buckingham were both cynical chancers. Their friendship, though often ruptured, was just as frequently repaired. In December 1666, the ever-combustible Buckingham quarrelled with a fellow aristocrat, the Marquess of Dorchester, when he jostled him during a joint session of Parliament. In the ensuing altercation, Buckingham pulled off the Marquess’s periwig, while Dorchester retaliated by tearing out a fistful of the duke’s fair hair – of which he was inordinately proud. Such an affray was a rarity in the dignified House of Lords, and the two peers were both sent to the Tower for a cooling-off period. Within a week, however, both were freed after making a grovelling apology at the bar of Parliament.

Though made a member of Charles’s cabinet known as the Cabal (from the initials of their names), Buckingham never settled into the role of elder statesman. Vexatious and vindictive, his favourite medium was hot water. (Although he had such an aversion to washing that his reputation as a stinker was as pungent as his moral turpitude.) He darkened the Tower’s doors for a third time in June 1667 as a result of his own complex intrigues. Accused of necromancy and casting the king’s horoscope, Buckingham may well have been innocent of the actual charges. But the whiff of sulphur clung to him. He sealed his fate by dodging the serjeant-at-arms sent to arrest him at his Northamptonshire country home, Althorp (later the childhood home and burial site of Diana, Princess of Wales), opting to go on the run.