This time it was a colonel named Thomas Blood, who had a bone to pick with the king for confiscating his land in Ireland.ĭuring the late 17 th Century, the public was able to view the jewels one day a week in the Tower of London for a small tip, paid to the only person watching over the treasures from his apartment above – Mr Talbot Edwards, a 77-year-old man. Three hundred years later, when Charles II reigned and a civil war dragged on, another opportunist would attempt their luck at the Crown Jewels. As word spread, Pudlicote was eventually captured and sent to his death in the Tower, where the King had his skin removed, and nailed to the door of the Abbey as warning to other sticky-fingered merchants. Jewelry and foreign coins began appearing at goldsmith’s shops as far away as York, and a pile of treasures were found hidden in the Abbey’s churchyard, for what one can only assume was safekeeping. Diamonds were found by boys playing in a field. He remained hidden inside the chamber for two days gathering as much as he could carry, before escaping unnoticed – until treasure began appearing all over the country.Ī fisherman on the Thames found a bejewelled silver cup in one of his nets. On April 24, 1303, he found himself in a room filled with jewels, silverware and gold florins. According to his later confession, the merchant had planted hemp seeds around the Abbey’s outside wall, and five months later, when those seeds had grown into decent cover, he spent weeks chiselling away at the masonry to avoid the booby- trapped staircase. What happened next is between Pudlicote, the monks, and the walls of the Abbey. Pudlicote, the perspicacious type, set out to become friendly with the monks and after several months he was padding around the Abbey and its grounds unsupervised. To avoid stumbling into a small hole, where you would either starve to death or await arrest, a wooden ladder was needed to traverse several broken spots – and only the Abbey’s monks were privy to these death traps. Its walls are 13-feet thick, and originally the only entrance to the room was via a tiny, cramped, and booby-trapped stairway. The Pyx Chamber at the Abbey was for centuries considered the most secure room in the entire island of Great Britain. “As long as there’s been jewelry, there have been thieves at the ready to steal it – sometimes successfully, sometimes not,” said jewelry historian Diana Singer, who explained with a hint of veneration that it was 1303, when England’s King Edward I was at war with William Wallace (of Braveheart fame) just north of the Scottish border that the Crown Jewels were pilfered in one of history’s first recorded jewelry heists.ĭespite being tucked away safely behind ironbound doors in Westminster Abbey, one hundred and sixty-two dollars’ worth (at the time, more than a year’s tax revenue for the entire Kingdom of England) of gemstones and silver was stolen by Richard de Pudlicote, a former merchant who was bored and struggling for money. It is a feat of patience and engineering that yields some of the biggest payouts in history, and also some of the longest prison sentences.ĭaring jewel heists aimed at the world’s most storied and expensive diamonds have been carried out for more than 700 hundred years, but no matter how carefully planned, how audacious, or how many exquisite Grace Kelly’s are rooting for the (most usually) well-dressed and dapper-looking thieves blindsided by ego, the mimetic men almost always get caught. But tales of jewelry thieves rarely end with such orgasmic fireworks, and a heist is no mere robbery. Full of romantic intrigue, thrill hunting, and a notorious man of mystery, the film acts as a picturesque backdrop for a woman’s insatiable desire for danger, and diamonds. ‘You have a very strong grip, the kind a burglar needs,’ Grace Kelly coos at Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 classic, To Catch a Thief.
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