Thomas Blood: The Man Who Stole the Crown Jewels and Won

In 1671, a man in a clergyman's collar smashed the Imperial State Crown flat with a mallet and tried to stuff it down his trousers. Caught red-handed committing high treason, Thomas Blood should have been executed. Instead, the king rewarded him with an estate and made him a celebrity.This deep dive untangles the wild true story of a 17th-century chameleon who treated loyalty as currency. From civil-war defections and a botched kidnapping of a duke to the audacious Crown Jewels heist, we explore how charm, nerve, and shamelessness let Blood outwit the highest laws in the land, and why a king chose to reward the traitor over his loyal servant.How Blood switched sides in the Civil War, gained Cromwellian lands, then lost everything at the RestorationThe failed plot to storm Dublin Castle and the violent ambush of the Duke of OrmondThe patient con on Talbot Edwards that set up the May 1671 Tower of London heistFour competing theories for King Charles II's baffling pardon and rewardHis later ruin in a lawsuit with Buckingham and the exhumation to confirm he was truly dead