BURIED TREASURE: the mystery of an incredible hoard of ancient jewels found buried in London
A jeweller’s treasure trove or a robber’s plunder? Genevieve Gannon delves into the enduring mystery of the Cheapside Hoard, a stash of hundreds of ancient jewels found buried beneath a shop in London.
For almost 300 years, a Colombian emerald the size of a plum lay buried beneath the foundations of a shop in London’s Cheapside. The green jewel had been cut, polished, hollowed out and fitted with a gold clock, which was set with smaller emeralds, to turn it into an incredibly ostentatious pocket watch.
The emerald has been described by London Museum curator Hazel Forsyth as “one of the most exquisite jewels in the world”. The only thing more remarkable than the fact it had been hidden in the ground is that it was not alone. An agate cameo of Cleopatra dating back to the time before Christ; a rare sapphire pendant believed to have been worn by a Byzantine emperor; a cameo from the court of Queen Elizabeth I; and hundreds of other jewels and gemstones had all been parcelled up with the watch and lowered into the earth.
They remained there, unseen, until the Cheapside building was demolished in 1912 and a worker noticed something glittering beneath his pickaxe. Amid clods of dirt, labourers found pearls, rubies, necklaces and gems. All told, roughly 500 pieces were retrieved from the hole in the ground. And even today, they remain shrouded in mystery.
The treasure trove, which came to be known as the Cheapside Hoard and now forms part of the London Museum’s permanent collection, “is the greatest hoard of its type and the most important source of our knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery,” Hazel explained, launching a fleeting exhibition of the jewels.
“Yet nobody knows who they belonged to. Nobody knows exactly when they were buried,” says author Kirsty Manning, who spent the past three years researching the hoard for her book The Lost Jewels. “The jewels themselves are really quite dazzling. For someone to have been in possession of such a collection and then never returned for them, something quite devastating and monumental must have happened.”
A popular theory is that the hoard is a 17th-century jeweller’s stock and trade, and he buried it when he was forced to leave London to go to war or escape the Plague. The range of pieces supports this theory.
“It’s a mixture of finished pieces, pieces of the moment, the latest fashion and design, alongside pieces that have been in circulation for centuries,” Hazel said.
“Cheapside was known as goldsmiths’ row,” Kirsty adds. “It was where the jewellers, the diamond cutters and goldsmiths all had their shopfronts and it was very famous for the trade of jewellery and stones.”
International trade increased during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I from 1558 to 1603, facilitating the rise of the merchant class. This 17th century “new money” was eager to show off its wealth, and the enamelled chains found tangled in the hoard were fashionable at the time, says Kirsty. One particularly charming pin featuring two sapphires and a rose-coloured spinel – a stone often mistaken for a ruby, with a crystal so perfect that it’s said by the Burmese to be “polished by the spirits” – is similar to a piece worn in a portrait of Queen Anne of Denmark (1574-1619) at a time when the Danish royals were the ultimate trendsetters.
“One of the reasons the Cheapside Hoard is so important is that it is quite literally a time capsule of craft skills and global trade,” Hazel said. “London’s gem trade in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was … highly organised and necessarily secretive.”
Given the breadth of the collection and the social climate of the time, Kirsty suspects that the person who buried the jewels might have done so for nefarious reasons.
“I do wonder if it had been stolen,” she says. “Or if it was a hedge – perhaps somebody had stolen it and put it aside to go on the black market.”
If this was the case, it would be in keeping with the murky nature of how the jewels were recovered. When the buildings concealing the jewels were slated for demolition in 1910, an unusual clause was added to the agreement: any antiquities found among the ruins were to be turned over to the owners of the properties. But instead of giving the jewels to the owners, the workers took them to a local pawnbroker and antiques dealer named George Fabian Lawrence, or “Stony Jack”.
For years, Stony Jack had feared valuable artefacts were being lost because London’s “navvies” were mistaking them for rubbish, and so he cultivated a relationship with them. They would bring him things they found on building sites, knowing he’d exchange whatever they brought for the cost of a pint, even if the find had no value.
Hazel quotes Stony Jack as saying: “I taught them that every scrap of metal, pottery, glass or leather that has been lying under London may have a story to tell.”
The workers clearing the Cheapside buildings brought soil-encrusted treasure to Stony Jack for days, including one big pot that has been described as a “leather bucket” containing jewellery, until he had amassed the bulk of the hoard.
One antiquity of particular interest was a small piece of agate fashioned into a portrait, believed to be a likeness of the daughter of the powerful Grand Duke of Tuscany Francis de Medici. Marie de Medici married Henry IV and became Queen of France. Portraits such as this, or commessos, were only produced in Florence, and the subject, Marie de Medici, was also a favourite model of painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens.
The oldest piece is a beautiful cameo of Queen Cleopatra, believed to have been carved in Alexandria in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE.
“This gem was probably directly associated with Cleopatra,” Hazel explained in an interview with the Gemological Institute of America. The cameo is in “almost pristine condition”, despite having been in circulation for possibly 2000 years, and was created by an “extremely skilful” craftsman, who would have been working virtually blind as he cut the gemstone against a revolving wheel. “It’s an absolute tour de force.”
A pale blue sapphire depicting a biblical scene – the incredulity of Saint Thomas – is embellished with a large, silver-grey pearl. The piece is “almost certainly the quality that would have been made for an emperor,” Hazel said. She believes it is the most important example of Byzantine jewellery in the world.
Says Kristy: “I try to imagine it being made in a Turkish workshop in the palace and the smells of the food being cooked nearby and someone over their anvil, carving away and making it.” A solitaire Champleve ring of baked black-and-white enamel features a table-cut Golconda diamond from the mines that once produced the purest and most precious diamonds in the world. Golconda, in East India, is where the Hope Diamond and the Koh-i-Noor (the egg-sized diamond in the Crown Jewels) are said to have originated.
“They were and still are the most valuable diamonds in the world,” Kirsty says. “They don’t mine diamonds in India anymore.”
She explains that, had the jewels not been buried and handed over to the museum, this insight into the 17th century would have been lost, because jewellery was often repurposed and reset. Because they survived intact, scholars have been
able to study them for clues as to who buried them and why.
In that sense, perhaps the most significant treasure is one of the most ordinary looking. It is a small, chipped semi-precious carnelian intaglio that looks like a cherryflavoured boiled lolly. Next to the Indian diamonds and spinels, it could easily be overlooked, were it not for the distinct heraldic seal that has been cut into it to identify the sender as the Viscount of Stafford. This unique seal offers one of the most compelling clues to the hoard’s origins.
“Because the Viscount received his title in 1640, experts are able to narrow down the concealment date of the Cheapside Hoard,” write Robert Weldon and Cathleen Jonathan of the Gemological Institute of America.
“That’s the thing that has given the academics an anchor,” Kirsty adds.
This timeline is supported by a cameo of Queen Elizabeth I.
Experts say the style of dress the Queen is wearing suggests it was created after 1575. Hazel has noted similarities between the cameo and the image of Elizabeth I featured in the Armada Jewel, which was created in 1588 to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
The buildings whose demolition revealed the jewels were built in
1667, “to replace those lost in the Great Fire of London a year earlier,” Hazel writes in London’s Lost Jewels. From these clues, historians are able to pin down a 26-year window in which the jewels may have been buried.
And by identifying roughly when this occurred, they can get a better idea of why the treasures were concealed.
The mid-17th century was an extraordinary time of political and social change. It was “the era of the Great Fire of London and the Plague and civil revolution,” Kirsty says. “I wonder if someone buried them and went off to war and didn’t return because they were killed.”
Or they could have left London to escape the Plague or the Great Fire. “So many did decamp to the outskirts of London, with the idea that they would return … but, for some reason, they never did.”
For a jeweller on the run, the bulky, priceless hoard would have been difficult to conceal.
“It would have been very troubling to travel across England at that time with 500 jewels,” Kirsty says. “You could have been killed or kidnapped.”
Whoever dug that hole put in train a mystery that still fascinates today. And, in years to come, the Cheapside Hoard will enthral visitors to the Museum of London from its own purpose-built gallery in the museum’s new building in West Smithfield, scheduled to open in 2024.
The news that these treasures will at last be on permanent display couldn’t have come at a better time, Kirsty says. Reflecting on the hoard in a year when Australia has endured its own great fires and now a pandemic has given her a sense of hope.
“That emerald watch is the absolute epitome of human creativity and endeavour. There’s something magical and optimistic about that,” she says. “This emerald has come from deep in a cave in Colombia, crossed oceans and then passed through I don’t know how many hands in London. Then they have inserted a watch that has been assembled from Italian parts in the 1600s.
“I feel strangely reassured by that at this moment. While it’s certainly a very unsettling time, history shows us we will get through this. London has rebuilt and we will do that, too.” AWW
The Lost Jewels by Kirsty Manning, published by Allen & Unwin, is on sale now.