On the morning of 9 May 1671, a man disguised as a clergyman was caught inside the Tower of London holding a flattened crown under his cloak, having just stabbed the elderly keeper entrusted to guard it.
Thomas Blood had spent months building a friendship with Talbot Edwards, visiting, bringing gifts, even proposing a marriage between their families, before turning on him to steal the Crown Jewels.
Blood should have hanged. Instead, King Charles II granted him a private audience, pardoned him in full, restored his confiscated estates, and gave him a pension of 500 pounds a year. Historians still debate why.
We follow Blood’s slow campaign of trust, the violence that nearly ended in Edwards’s death, and the royal mercy that has never been fully explained, inside the fortress built to guard England’s crown.
This is the story of Thomas Blood, the man the king pardoned for stealing the crown jewels.
Want to learn more? Read the Tower of London Guide
REMARKABLE PLACE.
Visiting the Tower of London: A Prison for the Powerful
William the Conqueror ordered the Tower of London built within a year of taking the English crown, because a conquered city needed immediate proof that the conquest would not be undone. The White Tower, the pale stone keep at the centre of the site, went up on the eastern edge of the city walls where every ship on the Thames and every merchant on London Bridge could see it. It was not built to hold prisoners. It was built to be looked at.
