The Brilliant Story Of The Man Who Stole The Crown Jewels And NEARLY Got Away With It...

447 years ago a small group of men actually stole the Crown Jewels of England from the Tower of London and came within a few feet of escaping with them.

The story of this audacious robbery is good enough to share all by itself.

There is just one problem with doing that. You can't tell the story without trying desperately to explain the bigger story of the man who was the mastermind of the robbery.

And once you try to explain HIS story you quickly come to the conclusion that he was, honestly, one of the most amazing chaps who ever lived.

Without hyperbole, this is the story of a man who in an extraordinary period of just over one decade played many roles upon the stage of British history- a veteran, a magistrate, a spy, a revolutionary, an action hero, a religious fanatic, a conman, and master of disguise; a highwayman, kidnapper, a secret agent, a criminal mastermind with a silver tongue and, finally, the man with the ability to seemingly get away with anything.

He sounds like some insane mix of James Bond, Kaiser Sozey, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Moriarty all mixed together. An Irish rogue whose tale is so fantastical there is no way that any of the following could possibly be true. Except... everything you are about to read is completely true.

This is the rather epic tale of Captain Thomas Blood. The man who stole the Crown Jewels of England...

(The Infamous Captain Thomas Blood) Boring stuff/Family history...

His is NOT a made up name. Seriously, it's a real surname (but just so damn cool). The Blood family were a long established group of Protestant Anglo-Irish, who owned land in County Clare and had a long history of service to the English crown.

Pillars of the community types. His father is variously described as a wealthy blacksmith, steel mill owner and landlord. Take it as read he was fairly well off.

Our hero, Thomas Blood, was born in Clare around 1618 but it is clear from a young age he was raised and educated over in Lancashire in England.

Please note Thomas was something you don't see any more. He wasn't Irish as we know it, but Anglo-Irish. These were Irish men and women born and raised who saw their homeland as just part of the greater kingdom of the islands.

They were proud to be Irish (often spoke Gaelic) but saw themselves not as separate from the rest of Britain. Best example of an Anglo-Irishman was the Duke of Wellington.

Anyways, Thomas is referred to as Irish throughout but he probably would never have used this to describe himself...

The war hero

This story begins sometime around 1642. Thomas Blood had grown up away from his family, being educated in England, where by all accounts he was very smart.

He had married an English woman called Margret Holcroft, whose father was a politician (MP for Liverpool to be precise). Thomas and Margret seemed destined for a quiet life, when the English Civil War broke out.

Thomas immediately answered the call and in the battle between the Crown and Parliament, the 24 year old joined the Royalist side, upholding the long family tradition of serving King and country. He fought with distinction apparently, but as time passed he eventually swapped sides.

The usual excuse was that he saw the Royalists were losing and he just jumped ship, but I think that misses another, more realistic reason. His father in law, the MP for Liverpool?

He had become a Colonel in the parliamentary army and there was a very real possibility that his wife/father in law actually convinced him of the righteousness of the parliamentarian cause.

Whatever the case, when Blood swapped sides, he served Cromwell bravely and well and was eventually granted the rank of Captain in the New Model Army.

He was seen as loyal enough to the military dictatorship established under Cromwell afterwards that he was awarded the position of Justice of the Peace and granted a large estate out of seized royalist land in England and Ireland.

He and his wife settled down after the fighting ended and they had at least five children. His life now seemed utterly content and set- a war hero made county magistrate, serving the Commonwealth. But aged 42 things began to go wrong for him...

(The Duke of Ormonde)

Regime change and the start of his adventures...

In 1660 the Crown was restored and Charles II was now ruling the country. Thomas fled with his family back to his estates in Ireland, as the King was in the mood for vengeance upon supporters of the old regime.

He tired to keep his head down for a bit but in 1662 the King passed a new Act of Settlement, which took back land previously seized by the Cromwellian state and returned it to its rightful owners. Bloods lands were taken from him and he was left destitute by this turn of events.

He was 44, bankrupt, unable to provide for his family and angry. His response was to immediately seek out other Old Cromwelian supporters in Ireland (contrary to popular myth, while Cromwell is utterly hated in Ireland to this day, he did have a large body of men who had fought for him living there also).

Many of these men, like Blood, had just lost everything, and they were angry and seeking to do something about it. By all accounts Thomas turned up like a whirlwind. Passionate, articulate, and intelligent.

Men of higher rank or those who had been planning something for longer quickly seemed to defer to Blood. Within a few months he was a leader of this rebellious group and was spearheading a plan to strike back. The plan was audacious and simple- a large group of armed men would storm Dublin Castle and kidnap/hold ransom the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, 1st Lord Ormonde (later Duke Ormonde).

The thing was state intelligence had spies within the group, and what followed was a cat and mouse game as Blood tries to root out the spies, using disinformation to negate their usefulness.

He kept changing the date of the attack in a hope of catching Ormonde by surprise. His excellent tradecraft was to no avail however as when the attack took place he and his conspirators ran into an ambush and many were arrested.

Blood escape and fled into the wilds of the Irish countryside. Here he spent some time as a fugitive, donning a variety of disguises (catholic priest, anabaptist preacher, even a Quaker) always staying one jump ahead of Lord Ormond's men.

He apparently showed a real skill in making friends easily, and getting them to hide him from his pursuers. This battle of wits between Blood and Ormonde created a long running fued that would last for years between the two men apparently. Eventually Thomas was able to flee Ireland, evading his pursuers, and made his way by boat to the Netherlands...

(2nd Anglo-Dutch War)

The Spy

Blood arrived in Holland, a fugative, but immediately doors seemed opened to him. Quickly he seemed to gain the trust of the most powerful men in the Dutch Republic; and this was significant.

While the Dutch Republic and England were not at war when he arrived, tensions between the two nations were high. Skirmishes between the Dutch and the Royal Navy were frequent, and the Dutch were desperate for reliable information/spies on the British.

Thomas Blood seemed to have served them in this capacity and he supposedly became friends none other than Admiral de Ruyter himself. De Ruyter is one of 'those' historical figures. Most folks hear his name and go 'who' and then wonder why naval historians look respectful and the people from the Netherlands grin.

Suffice to say- that in the glorious history of the Royal Navy no other enemy commander inflicted so much humiliation upon them as De Ruyter. This was the guy who launched the raid up the Medway river; who battled the English to a standstill and more.

A brilliant natural admiral, one of the finest in European history, it's fair to assume at this point Blood ends up working for him (formally or informally) with intelligence and espionage operations leading up to and during the outbreak of the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War.

While the Dutch under De Ruyter (by then admiral of their entire fleet) were busy destroying Royal Navy ships at port and coming remarkably close to raiding London itself, Blood seems to have been smuggled by the Dutch into England with the purpose of disrupting the enemy.

(Covenanters going into battle...)

The Revolutionary.

Blood immediately located the remains of the apocalypse believing, extremist Christian group, The Fifth Monarchists.

These were extreme puritans who only four years previously had attempted to seize control of London; die hard supporters of the Commonwealth, Blood was admitted to their clandestine ranks and quickly rose in their estimation.

It must be remembered- Britain had spent decades under an extremist Christian military dictatorship. This regime had been replaced with a wild extravagant government led by a king. This was not a stable country. The fear of another civil war was very real indeed. Blood fitted right in.

He was appointed to the ranks of the movement in regard to internal security- the Fifth Monarchists believed they were riddled with spies and sought to 'court-martial' any member they thought was revealing secrets to the state.

This usually carried the death sentence. Blood became either a judge or defence advocate within the movement; probably both. He was in charge of policing the group, weeding out traitors and improving its internal discipline.

He quickly rose to become one of their main leaders, especially in planning another uprising against the King. This was London in the immediate aftermath of the Great Plague and Great Fire. All was chaos, all was frantic, the entire city was an unsettled mess.

He was in his element. Somehow, however, Blood realised the secret services were closing in on him, and again donning a bewildering variety of disguises, escaped into Scotland. Here he met with another extremist Puritan group, the Covenanters, and by all accounts worked behind the scenes to instigate an armed uprising on November 27th 1666.

They say he was part of the battle Rullion Green where the Covenanters (under the command of fellow civil war veteran, James Wallace) went head to head with elements of the Scottish army. The rebellion was crushed and somehow, again, Thomas Blood got away. As hundreds of his fellow conspirators were killed, Blood escaped into thin air...

The Action Hero

Blood fled south to England, but state security forces were hot on his trail.

He changed his disguise and fled back home to Ireland, landing close to the garrison town of Carrickfergus.

Someone tipped off the local noble (the newly created Viscount Dungannon) and Blood had to jump into another boat to escape an ambush. He returned to England and yet again managed to shake off his pursuers, probably in the Lancashire region where he grew up. At this point you'd think he'd maybe lie low for a while right? Nope.