Are those the Crown Jewels down your trousers? BOOKS
Well, yes, since you ask! The story of England’s most audacious gems raid
DUrINg April 1671, a country parson called Dr Ayliff showed up at the Tower of London with his wife, asking to see the Crown Jewels — a surprisingly straightforward request back then.
The jewels were guarded only by 77-year-old Talbot edwards, who’d show them to anyone for a small fee (handling them cost a little more).
During the visit, Mrs Ayliff mysteriously collapsed and was nursed by Mrs edwards, who lived with her husband over the shop. As a result, the couples began a friendship, which, over the following weeks, developed to such an extent that Dr Ayliff suggested his wealthy nephew might be a good match for the edwards’s unmarried daughter.
And so, on May 9, the parson brought his nephew along, together with some friends who wondered if they could take a quick look at the Crown Jewels before the meeting.
edwards cheerfully agreed — at which point, ‘ Dr Ayliff ’ and friends revealed themselves to be an armed gang, hit him over the head with a mallet and, when he wouldn’t keep quiet, stabbed him in the stomach. One gang member then stuck a gold orb down his breeches, while the fake parson grabbed the Imperial State Crown.
They might have got away with it, too, but for the sudden arrival home of the edwards’s son, Wythe, after ten years of soldiering abroad.
WYThe raised the alarm, gave chase and, after a gun battle, ‘Dr Ayliff ’ was taken into custody — where, to the authorities’ delight, he turned out to be Colonel Thomas Blood, one of the country’s most wanted men. (his wife had been played by an actress with an apparently good line in mysterious collapses.)
The Dictionary Of National Biography describes Blood’s career as having ‘ few parallels in the period’. But, as any readers of robert hutchinson’s rattling but carefully researched piece of popular history will realise, this is a masterpiece of scholarly understatement.
Born in Ireland in 1618, Blood first made his mark fighting for the royalists in the Civil War — right up to the time when it became obvious they were going to lose — and he joined Oliver Cromwell’s army instead.
happily for him, this meant that, after Cromwell’s victory, he was rewarded with thousands of acres of Irish land. Less happily, when the monarchy was restored in 1660, he was punished by having them taken away again.
And with that, Blood (his real name, incidentally, although the ‘colonel’ bit was made up) became a full-time rebel.
Of course, the traditional view of the restoration is that it was a merry old time, complete with saucy wenches and bewigged fops swinging tankards about. In reality, as hutchinson makes chillingly clear, it was a period of great national anxiety.
A paranoid government established a monopoly over the Post Office to intercept people’s letters. A network of spies ensured that any unwise words in a tavern could lead to immediate arrest.
Then again, the government did have plenty to be paranoid about, especially from nonconformist Protestants such as Blood. In 1662, for example, Lord Ormond, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, foiled a plan for an attack on Dublin Castle by arresting so many people, he had to build a new jail. he also offered a reward for capturing those ringleaders who’d escaped — a list headed by Thomas Blood.
For the next few years, Blood was the Scarlet Pimpernel of his day. As his legend grew, he
was suspected (usually rightly) of involvement in any number of rebellions — and even (definitely wrongly) of starting the Great Fire of London.
After a quieter period as an entirely unqualified Essex doctor and parttime highwayman, Blood returned to public life in 1667 by masterminding the daring rescue of a non-conformist rebel being taken from London to York under armed guard.
Three years later, he attempted, less successfully, to snatch his old enemy Lord Ormond from his coach in London and hang him at Tyburn. Finally came that raid on the Crown Jewels. All of which explains why the authorities were so delighted to have got their man at last.
But it also makes what happened next even more improbable.
After his arrest, Blood insisted, with characteristic nerve, that he’d talk only to the King — and, to his courtiers’ amazement, Charles II agreed to meet him. Stranger still, the interview went so well that Blood was given a royal pardon and a handsome pension in return for agreeing to spy on his former comrades.
Blood can’t be said to have gone into deep cover — preferring, as one disgruntled courtier reported, to stroll the courtyard of Whitehall Palace ‘in a new suit and periwig, exceedingly pleasant and jocose’.
Admittedly, he did try to persuade other rebels that, if they gave up, they, too, could expect the King’s forgiveness. On the whole, though, he seems to have used his new status as a chance to enrich himself — not least by means of what we’d now call ‘cash for access’.
HE remained so widely distrusted that, after he died of a fever in 1680, the authorities were forced to exhume his body to prove his death was real and not just another ruse. So, why on Earth did Charles pardon him?
Hutchinson sifts the various theories with characteristic thoroughness and lightness of touch, but without ever quite solving the mystery.
Charles certainly had some sympathy with the nonconformists whose worship was still banned.
Blood may have had some influential friends, possibly because he’d done a spot of opportunistic royal spying a few years earlier.
nonetheless, one important reason does seem to be that Charles was simply charmed by the man. And, if so, he’s clearly not the only one. Objectively viewed, Blood was, for all his swashbuckling glamour, a violent, religious fundamentalist, many of whose actions would now qualify as terrorism.
Yet not only does Hutchinson end up expressing his undisguised admiration for the ‘ astonishing effrontery’ of a ‘true adventurer’ — but his often eye-popping book makes it difficult for the reader not to feel the same way.