The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood (21 page)

His true purpose, of course, was to reconnoitre the layout of the Martin Tower, discover any flaws or weaknesses in the security protecting the regalia and to spy out the best escape route from the fortress, across its moat, and into the anonymous safety of the surrounding teeming streets of East London. Unlike any other tourist, the colonel also needed a feasible excuse to return to the Jewel Tower on further occasions in order to hone his plans.

The historian and clergyman John Strype was later given an account of Blood's feat by the hapless custodian Talbot Edwards, which is the closest we can get to an eyewitness account of Blood's attempt to steal the Crown Jewels. The Pepys papers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford also contain a near-contemporary account of the crime.
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Blood's strategy was remarkably simple, if not ingenious. It was based on the sound psychological principle of winning a victim's trust in order to gain access to the desired objective.

It began with his ‘wife', having admired the Crown Jewels, suddenly becoming ill and feeling faint with a distressing stomach ‘qualm' or convulsion. A worried and concerned Blood then

desired Mr Edwards to send for some spirits, who immediately caused his wife to fetch some whereof when she had drank, she courteously invited her upstairs to repose herself upon a bed.

Which invitation she accepted and soon recovered.

At their departure, they seemed very thankful for the civility.
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If ever there was a convenient illness, this was one. Three or four days later Blood was back, bearing six pairs of fine white gloves,
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as a generous gift to Mrs Edwards as a token of his wife's great appreciation for her kindness.

Having thus begun the acquaintance, they made frequent visits to improve it, [Mrs Blood] professing that she [could] never sufficiently acknowledge the kindness [shown to her].
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Having made some small respite of his compliments, he returned again and said to Mrs Edwards that his wife could discourse of nothing but the kindness of those good people in the Tower . . .

She had long studied and at length bethought herself of a handsome way of requital.

The honeyed trap was about to be sprung. The colonel's tactic was no longer the expression of gratitude and the giving of gifts, but the temptation posed by a very powerful bait indeed. This was the fulfilment of every mother's secret dream: the prospect of her daughter's socially advantageous marriage to a well-off young suitor.

Blood told a delighted Mrs Edwards that her daughter Elizabeth was a ‘pretty gentlewoman' and suddenly added: ‘I have a young nephew who has £200 or £300 a year [income] in land [which] is at my disposal [to assign]. If your daughter be free and you approve of it, I will bring him hither to see her and we will endeavour to make it a match.'
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The steel jaws of Blood's trap had snapped shut.

One can imagine the happiness his surprising words sparked in the hearts of Mr and Mrs Edwards. An unexpected wedding beckoned for their daughter! Overwhelmed, the keeper ‘easily assented' to Blood's gallant proposal and asked the ‘parson' to dine with him that day in celebration. Naturally his invitation was accepted and, falling into his pretended role, Blood could not resist saying grace before they all sat down to dinner, performing it with

great devotion and, casting up his eyes, concluded his long-winded grace with a hearty prayer for the king, queen and royal family.

Afterwards, he was given a tour of their quarters in the Martin Tower and ‘seeing a handsome case of pistols there' Blood ‘expressed a great desire to buy them to present [to] a young lord who was his neighbour'. His real motive, of course, was to ensure there
were no weapons available to Edwards when he next came calling.

When he departed, Blood piously blessed the Edwards family ‘with a canonical benediction' and agreed the happy day and hour when he would bring his nephew to introduce him to his intended bride.
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This was Tuesday, 9 May 1671.

Curiously, his arrival at the Martin Tower was set at seven o'clock in the morning, an unusually early time for wooing, however ardent the bridegroom. Patently Blood wanted as few people about as possible for his exploit and old Edwards, doubtless cock-a-hoop at the forthcoming marriage and still naïvely harbouring no suspicions whatsoever, meekly agreed to the arrangement.

At the appointed hour, his daughter was up betimes to put on her best dress to impress and charm her intending husband-to-be. While her
toilette
was nearing completion, her father was surprised to see the parson arrive with three men. In fact there were four, and unknown to Edwards all were heavily armed with swordsticks (with rapier blades hidden inside the canes), daggers and a pair of pocket flintlock pistols apiece. As well as Blood, there was his son and Messrs Perrot and Halliwell, the last-named soon to unwittingly play the part of the blushing groom.
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The fifth accomplice, William Smith, remained outside the Tower walls guarding the group's horses, ready for the escape.

The ‘parson', Thomas Blood junior and Perrot entered the Jewel House tower, leaving Halliwell outside to maintain a lookout. Edwards' daughter considered it would be very immodest for her to come down to greet the party before she was summoned, so Elizabeth sent her maid ‘to take a view of the company and to bring her a description of her gallant'. The servant believed that Halliwell, loitering outside and trying not to look suspicious, was the man in question ‘because he was the youngest . . . and she returned to her young mistress with the character she had formed of his person'.
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Elizabeth was apparently suitably impressed. Recalling the
London Gazette
description of him as a wanted man the year before as ‘a middle-sized man, plump faced, with [smallpox] pock holes, of a demure countenance . . . about forty years of age', one
must question the maid's judgement, eyesight or reaction to what she saw. Certainly, here was no ‘young nephew'.

Blood meanwhile told Edwards that he and his friends would not go upstairs until his wife arrived and apologised for her lateness. To pass the time while they were awaiting her, perhaps he would be kind enough to show the Imperial Crown to them? The keeper happily agreed, possibly considering his pocketing of more fees. Another version of events repeats Blood's explanation that these men were his friends, due to leave London the next morning, ‘to whom he had promised a sight of the regalia' and could Mr Edwards ‘have the kindness to gratify their curiosity, though perhaps the time might not be so seasonable, as being a little too early'.
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In any event, within seconds the custodian had become the victim of a cruel and brutal assault.

As soon as the party gathered in the room housing the Crown Jewels, the door was slammed shut behind them and a cloak was thrown over Edwards' head as he bent to unlock the wire door protecting the regalia. As the shocked old soldier struggled, they ‘clapped a gag into his mouth which was a great plug of wood with a small hole in the middle [for him] to take breath [through] . . .'. He was speedily tied by ‘waxed leathers . . . around his neck and they fastened an iron hook to his nose [so] that no sound might pass from him that way neither'.

Blood helpfully informed Edwards, his eyes bulging and now painfully gasping for air, that they intended to steal the Imperial State Crown, the globe and sceptre. The choice of crown was apparently decided by its lightness and bulk, compared with the St Edward's Crown.

He was told that if ‘he would quietly submit . . . they would spare his life'. Otherwise, added Blood pointedly, ‘he could expect no mercy'.

Undaunted, the keeper ‘forced himself to make all the noise that he possibly could' in the hope that his family upstairs would hear and raise the alarm.
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He was knocked to the floor by blows – ‘several unkind knocks' to the head – from a wooden mallet called a ‘beetle'
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which they
had brought with them ‘to beat together and flatten the crown to make it more easily portable'.
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Blood repeated his grim warning: if Edwards ‘would lie quietly they would spare his life – but if not, upon the next attempt to discover them, they would kill him'. To emphasise their murderous intent, the three men drew and pointed their stiletto daggers close to the keeper's throat and chest.

Edwards may have been elderly and possibly infirm, but he was no coward. After making ‘greater noise' he was again thwacked by the robbers ‘nine or ten' times on the head (‘for so many bruises were found upon his skull') and finally he was stabbed in the stomach with a dagger, causing a deep puncture wound that began to bleed copiously. He was also cut ten or eleven times on the head.
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After his barbarous treatment he lay prone on the stone slabs of the floor, wisely pretending to be unconscious or dead. One of the party argued that Edwards should be killed immediately, but Blood ‘would not permit so great a piece of barbarism, as [wearing] a disguise that would have rendered the fact doubly heinous had he added murder to robbery under the notion [appearance] of an ecclesiastical person'.
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His accomplices may not have appreciated the intellectual niceties of his argument at such a tense moment. One knelt down by the custodian to see if he was still breathing. He commented: ‘He is dead, I'll warrant him.'

Concerns for Edwards' health and welfare instantly forgotten, they got to work on the task they had come to perform. Blood took the Imperial State Crown out of the recess and passed the gold orb to Perrot, who put it into his loose-fitting breeches. His son began to file one of the sceptres in two as it was too long to fit in the small sack they had brought to conceal it and Blood used the beetle to crush flat the raised bows of the crown so it could fit into the bag he was to carry under his cloak.

Providence then took an extraordinary turn.

Edwards' son Wythe unexpectedly arrived home on leave after his ten years' soldiering overseas.

Halliwell, still on watch outside the Martin Tower, was shocked to see this stranger boldly walk up to its doorway. He inquired civilly ‘With whom he would speak?'
but the younger Edwards brushed him aside and went upstairs, where he was joyously welcomed by his mother, wife and sister after they recovered from their surprise at his entrance.

The gang's lookout rushed into the Crown Jewels chamber and warned Blood of the son's arrival. The last thing they wanted was to contend with a fit, able-bodied soldier who knew how to handle himself in a fight. Blood was on the floor, trying to pick up the gemstones dislodged by his beating of the crown. They ran out, carrying the stolen regalia – but leaving behind the sceptre which Blood junior had failed to file in two. Thinking Edwards was dead, they had not bothered to tie his hands. After their departure he struggled up to his feet, clutching his stomach wound and removed the wooden gag. Painfully he cried out, his voice rising in desperate urgency: ‘Treason! Murder!'

His daughter heard his cries and stumbled down the stairs to find her father bruised and collapsed on the floor in a widening pool of blood. After he stammered out what had happened, Elizabeth, with a commendable sense of duty, dashed outside and shouted repeatedly: ‘Treason! The Crown is stolen!'

Blood and his accomplices had meanwhile hurried, ‘with more than ordinary haste', south-eastwards across an area of open ground in the Tower's inner ward which, over the previous five years, had been cleared of the old palace buildings. As they rounded the massive block of the eleventh-century White Tower, Blood and Perrot were seen to ‘jog each other with their elbows as they went, which caused them to be suspected and pursued'.

Back in the Martin Tower, Wythe Edwards was now fortuitously joined by the Swedish-born Captain Martin Beckman, a former rather undistinguished spy who had served time in the Tower in 1664, but who was now rehabilitated and serving loyally as an engineer to the king's ordnance stored in the fortress.
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Both men had heard Elizabeth's anguished cries and rushed to the wounded keeper inside the Jewels chamber. As Talbot Edwards lay almost stupefied on the floor, they believed him dead and left the supposed corpse with his grieving wife and daughter to pursue
Blood and his party, black vengeance uppermost in their hearts.

By now the fugitives had skirted the building housing the main guard and were coming up to the Bloody Tower. Here they encountered the first of the Tower's sentries. Alerted by the urgent cries of the pursuers, the surprised soldier ordered them to ‘Stand!', pointed his musket, but fired wildly. Pausing in his flight, Blood aimed one of his pistols at the sentry's face but this bullet also missed its target. The noise of the gunshot, or just plain, simple fear, panicked the sentinel and he threw himself down and lay flat on the cobbles, guessing sensibly that the danger would soon pass.
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Ahead of them lay the Water Gate, providing access to the wide Tower wharf alongside the River Thames. The sentry there was a former parliamentary soldier called Sill, who, believing his fellow soldier had been shot and possibly killed, failed to put up any resistance to the robbers rushing past him and through the gate. The gang then

made all possible haste [along the wharf] towards the horses which attended St Catherine's Gate, called the Irongate [at the east end of the Tower], crying themselves, as they ran, ‘Stop the Rogues!'

And they were thought by all innocent, [Blood] being in the canonical habit.

Beckman, who must have been a fleet, sure-footed runner, caught up with them here and Blood paused, turned and fired his second pistol at his head. Beckman ducked and the shot passed harmlessly over him. He grabbed Blood, who still had the crown tucked up beneath his cloak, and there followed an unseemly and slightly ridiculous tug-of-war, as Beckman wrestled to snatch it from Blood's grasp.