An insight into one of history's most cunning, yet overlooked, events... Medieval London comes to life in Paul Doherty's gripping retelling of this early attempt to steal the Crown Jewels, the first great bank raid in history. 'Doherty tells the tale with verve incorporating much fascinating historical detail' - Historical Novels Review In the reign of King Charles II (1660 - 1685), there was a famous attempt to steal the crown jewels by the memorably named Colonel Blood. However, Blood's conspiracy was not the first such plot, and it was certainly not the most successful... Three centuries earlier, in 1303, Edward I of England (of Braveheart fame) was north of the Scottish border attempting to crush William Wallace, secure in the knowledge that he had stashed his royal treasures safely behind iron-bound doors in Westminster Abbey - a place of sanctity reputed to house Christ's body, and inhabited by pious Benedictine monks. Enter Richard Puddlicott: a former merchant and a charming, dissolute, rogue with a grudge against the king. He infiltrated the Abbey's inner circle (entertaining them on the proceeds of their own silver) and, before long, had managed to help himself to a good part of the treasure. The King's fury knew no bounds, but Puddlicott ran the King's men a merry dance before eventually being captured and sent - along with forty monks - to his death in Westminster. This exhilarating tale of cunning, deceit, lechery, monks, pimps and prostitutes is also the story of the first great bank raid in history. Until now - with most of the evidence still in manuscripts, in Latin or Norman French - very little has been written about it. With his usual verve, blending vivid narrative and historical analysis, Paul Doherty takes the lid off both the medieval underworld and the 'holy' monastic community. The result is historically enlightening and a gripping read. What readers are saying about Paul Doherty: 'I was totally gripped. I have read a lot of history books and this is amongst the best I have read ' 'An interesting book, historically accurate and very well researched ' ' Doherty proves that he is a scholar as well as a writer of novels'
Release date:
June 11, 2013
Publisher:
Headline
Print pages:
255
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Mysteries of Alexander the Great (as Anna Apostolou)
A MURDER IN MACEDON
A MURDER IN THEBES
Alexander the Great
THE HOUSE OF DEATH
THE GODLESS MAN
THE GATES OF HELL
Matthew Jankyn (as P C Doherty)
THE WHYTE HARTE
THE SERPENT AMONGST THE LILIES
Non-fiction
THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF TUTANKHAMUN
ISABELLA AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF EDWARD II
ALEXANDER THE GREAT: THE DEATH OF A GOD
THE GREAT CROWN JEWELS ROBBERY OF 1303
THE SECRET LIFE OF ELIZABETH I
THE DEATH OF THE RED KING
‘Mes cum fust endormie e tapist dreiture’
‘Right and law be as if fast asleep’
Contemporary ballad
Today the Crypt of Westminster Abbey is, in both name and atmosphere, a gloomy and forbidding place. It lies buried beneath
the Chapter House of the Abbey, octagonal in shape with walls seventeen to eighteen feet thick. The width of its floor is
almost nine yards, the only light is provided by six windows with chamfered jambs and square heads. The jambs are set back
almost two yards from the outer face of the wall, they have a segmental pointed arch in front of them. The windows are heavily
barred, steel rods are embedded in the stone sill at the bottom and the square head of the window at the top. The floor inside
is tiled, the ceiling, a stone vault, has chamfered ribs radiating from a thick-set rounded column in the centre of the crypt
which has a moulded capital and base. This central column or pillar is about two feet in circumference and fashioned out of
red brick, on close inspection it will be found that some of these bricks can be removed to reveal hollow recesses behind them.1
The windows, as you look at them from left to right, peer out over what used to be the waste land and cemetery of the monks
of Westminster. Through the window on the far left of the column can be glimpsed the pathway which still stretches from the
south east door of the Abbey church leading to the main road across which stands the House of Lords. In 1303 this pathway
led from the Abbey to the Royal Palace. The window to the far right of the column now overlooks one of the gardens of the
Canons of the Abbey, in 1303 the window looked out over the most desolate of the Abbey grounds just below the Infirmary of
the Black Monks of Westminster. This sixth window is, in 2005, quite different from the other five, it has no stone sill.
The reason for this is that, between Tuesday 30th April 1303 and Friday the 3rd May 1303, the sill of this sixth window was
hacked away by the mason John of St Albans and a carpenter called Philip under the direction of a former merchant, Richard
de Puddlicott, in order to loosen the bars across the windows, this sill has never been replaced.
The entrance to the Crypt today is still as secure as it was in 1303 being entered by a doorway in the west wall down a corridor
and turret-staircase east of St Faith’s chapel, the ceiling above is barrel-vaulted. In 1303 the staircase was broken by a
two yard gap which could only be spanned by a wooden bridge, in 2005 the gap has been closed by wooden steps. The doors to
the staircase and Crypt are heavy with fortified locks. In 2005 these keys are held by the verger, in 1303 they were in the
custody of high ranking officials of the Royal Treasury. In 2005 the area outside the crypt window is a narrow grassy verge
and the private gardens of the Canons, in 1303 the entire area was wasteland, the rest God’s Acre, the cemetery of the monks.
In 2005 this gloomy Crypt has electric lighting but, in 1303, the six windows would be heavily shuttered by wooden boards
behind the iron bars, the only light would be from cresset torches fixed in iron sconces on the walls or wax candles and oil
lamps. In 2005 the Crypt holds nothing but some chests and an ironing board for altar cloths and other items. In 1303 however, the Crypt of Westminster was
a treasure house containing most of the royal regalia of the Crown of England as well as jewels, silver and gold coins, goblets,
jugs, chalices, cups, saucers, spoons, vases not to mention unique treasures such as the Cross of Neath; the Holy Cross of
Holyrood [the Black Cross of St Margaret from Scotland]: the Sceptre or the Rod of Moses: the sword of King Athelstan from
the ninth century, which had cut though the rock of Dunbar: the sword of Weyland the Smith last used to knight Henry II and
the sword of the mythical prince Tristan which had been presented to King John by the Holy Roman Emperor. The Crypt also held
important possessions of the reigning king, Edward I, [1272 to 1307], including the dagger used in an attempt to assassinate
him whilst he had been on crusade in the Holy Land. According to one story, Edward had been resting in his tent near Acre
when an assassin sent by the Old Man of the Mountain entered his tent with a poisoned dagger and tried to kill him. Edward
had slain the assassin whilst his beloved wife Eleanor of Castile sucked the poison from the wound. Edward I had recovered
and kept the dagger as a personal relic.2 All these treasures, both family and personal, became the plunder of a band of robbers.
‘Et Tenebrae facta est’
‘And darkness fell’
Scripture uses such a phrase to describe the betrayal of Christ by Judas. However, in the week beginning Monday 27 April 1303,
some of the Benedictine Monks of Westminster Abbey had forgotten the truth of the Gospels and did not wish to recall the constant
warnings of Christ and his prophets. How those things done in the dark would, one day, be judged in God’s full light. Indeed,
some of the Black Monks of the Great Abbey longed for the darkness to shroud the cemetery and wasteland which divided their
Abbey from the King’s great Palace of Westminster. Secretly, under the cover of dark, an unholy alliance had been forged between
monks, supposedly dedicated to the love of God and their neighbour, and the turbulent underworld of medieval London. On Tuesday
and Wednesday of that week a great conspiracy came to fruition in the Abbey: lights were doused, as were those in the Palace,
men hooded and visored, armed with bows and arrows, patrolled the gates leading into that stretch of dividing land which included the King’s delightful gardens,
open wasteland and God’s Acre. Here the deceased monks of Westminster lay shrouded in their graves, waiting to be wakened
by the blast of the Angel’s trumpet at that last moment of time when the elements would dissolve and Christ returned in judgement.
The frescoes and tympana at Westminster and elsewhere sharply depicted Christ Pantocrator, the supreme King in judgement,
coming on the clouds of heaven to separate the sheep from the goats. Yet, that was for the future. ‘Carpe diem – seize the day’ was more suited to some of the monks of Westminster and their equally sinister confederates. Naturally they
had to be careful, yet the threat of retribution was much diminished. The King and all his company were fighting in Scotland,
chasing Scottish rebels through the mist-strewn heather, the Abbot was rarely in residence and, even if he was, easily controlled,
whilst the Royal Palace and its grounds were firmly under the thumb of one of the principal ‘ordainers’ of the projected robbery.
Everything was ready. True, a wall separated the Abbey from the Palace but this assisted the robbers’ plans, being easily
patrolled and watched, whilst all gate-keys were in their hands. The escape route to King’s steps on the river Thames had
been clearly plotted out, carts and barges stood waiting under the protection of violent men who had prowled out of the sinister
twilight of medieval society. Once the treasure was moved, it could be distributed to the greedy merchants of the city. Of
course, despite such careful preparations, the robbery would be discovered but, like the warning from Dies Irae, of Celano’s famous hymn, that was for the future:
See what fear man’s bosom rendeth,
When from heaven the Judge descendeth,
On whose sentence all dependeth.
On those warm April evenings such holy thoughts were totally ignored by the gang of thieves lurking amongst the thick hempen
weeds deliberately grown across the monks’ cemetery to conceal their blasphemous handiwork. Once they had forced a window
into that great cellar, the Abbey Crypt, and lowered themselves into the King’s Treasury, the weeds would screen their crime.
The thieves had sprinkled the hempen seed the previous year; they were now eager to reap their own rich harvest. They had
plotted and planned one of the most outrageous robberies in the history of the Crown of England, to storm the Royal Treasury
and literally remove a king’s ransom in wealth. They had acted with great cunning. People accustomed to use that stretch of
land, be it farmers who had the right to pasture their cattle or those who wished to use the latrines built there, had been
totally excluded. Gates and doors were locked and guarded. The person at Westminster Abbey responsible for lighting and security,
in particular that area around the Crypt, was party to their plot as were others of his brethren. From their comfortable Abbey
chambers, these monks could hear the gang whispering amongst themselves and the echoing rasp of hammer and chisel as the bars
of the chosen window nearest in the Crypt were brutally forced.
The robbery did not take place within an hour but over three days. Once dawn arrived, the gang always withdrew whilst the
thick tangled weeds concealed their handiwork. On the third day, with their guards watching doors and gates and working in
the poor light of shuttered lanterns, the robbers achieved success. They broke through their chosen window and slid down into
the Crypt to wrench open coffers and chests. Cups and goblets, dishes, plates, precious jewels, sacred relics, gold and silver
coins, poured back up the narrow window shaft and into the hands of those waiting in the monks’ cemetery. A few items were
lost but the bulk was removed to the Palace or, across the wasteland and royal gardens, to barges waiting on the Thames. Some
of the thieves had been drinking heavily after carousing in a local prison; others were sober, eager to move their ill-gotten
wealth as quickly as possible. The leaders of the gang were very much aware of the danger. Edward I, King of England, was a hard man,
his face set like flint. If they were caught, little mercy would be shown, no pardon offered. The horrors of Newgate Prison
would be theirs, followed by an excruciating journey through the city on a hurdle to choke out their lives on one of London’s
many gallows. The rewards, on the other hand, were unimaginable – they would steal from a King to live like kings. By Friday,
1 May 1303, the crime had been committed. The Crown Jewels of England had been robbed.
‘Ry ne doit a feore de gere extra regnum ire’
‘A King should not leave his realm to wage war’
Contemporary ballad
Edward I of England was in Scotland at Linlithgow when he heard news of the robbery.1 The sixty-four-year-old king, now in the thirty-first year of his rule, had emerged as a redoubtable figure in his own kingdom
as well as on the international scene. In his long reign Edward had crushed opposition and developed a vision of his own power
and that of his kingdom. This was shared by the great lords and barons of his council, both spiritual and temporal and, above
all, by the powerful clerks, who staffed the great offices of state, the Exchequer (or Treasury), the Royal Household (with
its own treasury at Westminster and its wardrobe of stores in the Tower), as well as the Royal Writing Office or Chancery.
Such clerks were Edward’s allies, as well as his servants. Scholars of the Trivium and the Quadrivium when they had attended
the schools and halls of Oxford and Cambridge, many had also studied law, so they could advise their king on a wide range
of issues as well as act as his commissioners and judges. Edward I was very much aware of whose support he needed, so he had also tried to reach an accord with the powerful
mercantile families, dominant in the great trading cities of London, Bristol, York, and the Cinque Ports along the south coast.
London, however, was deeply suspicious of such an accord and jealous of its hard-won privileges.
The Crown of England was an autocratic institution where that famous precept of Roman legislation: ‘The will of the Prince
has force of law’ played a major part. Nevertheless, Edward I’s power had been limited, not only by his coronation oath but
by the clauses of Magna Carta which had been reconfirmed countless times since its first great sealing in 1215 during the
reign of his grandfather, King John. The troubles caused by Magna Carta, and the issues surrounding it, had dominated the
reign of Edward’s father King Henry III, when powerful opposition to the power of the Crown had been organized and led by
Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. By 1303 de Montfort had been dead for almost forty years but his legend still lingered,
even though, Edward had crushed de Montfort, once and for all, at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, destroying his forces, executing
or exiling his kin and allies. The great Earl’s corpse was mutilated and, according to popular rumour, its severed flesh fed
to dogs.2
When Henry III died in 1272 Edward I, accompanied by his wife Eleanor of Castile, returned from crusade in Outremer. Edward
worked hard to avoid his father’s mistakes. He recognized that England was changing, its arable fields being turned to pasture
because the hunger for English wool abroad was becoming almost insatiable. Edward exploited this growing wealth by negotiating
loans, raising money from his own merchants as well as merchant-bankers from Northern Italy, like the Frescobaldi. At the
same time he recognized the growing political aspirations of his kingdom’s land-owning classes and merchants. While business
was usually conducted with his great lords, both spiritual and temporal, in meetings of the royal council, he extended political
debate to the Commons, the representatives from the shires and towns who would meet for a ‘Parlement’ or talking session at Westminster or elsewhere.
However, Edward certainly did not accept the legal axiom of a contemporary lawyer, Bracton: ‘What affects all must be approved
by all.’ When the Commons did meet in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey or in some annexe to Westminster Hall, they were
obliged to listen to royal demands for taxes on ‘moveable’ and ‘immoveable’, property as well as witness Edward’s new type
of legal pronouncements, the statutes, covering a wide range of domestic and foreign issues.3
At such sessions, through both the Lords and the Commons, Edward I could promulgate his vision of a kingdom where the royal
writ would run from Dover to the northern tip of Scotland and west through Wales to the wilds of Ireland, even beyond the
Pale, the English fortified settlement around Dublin. Edward had ruthlessly pursued this vision. By 1303 English common law
extended to Ireland, whilst Edward’s Justiciar there vigorously enforced English policy. In fact, Edward I felt so confident
about his control of that country that, in 1301, he had issued 184 personal writs for military service to Irish lords to join
him in his Scottish war.4 By 1303 Wales, too, was firmly under his writ but only after a bitter military struggle along its narrow valleys. The Welsh
princes had subdued canton after canton, their land shared out among the great English families such as the Mortimers, Audleys,
Despencers and de Clares. Massive fortified castles had been built in the principality such as those at Conway and Caernarvon.
The Welsh princes had stoutly resisted, been crushed then risen in fresh revolt, only to be brutally suppressed. Their leader,
Prince Llewellyn had been killed, his brother David savagely executed. Terror and military might, not to mention bribes, had
subdued the Principality for which Edward had created a new title, the Prince of Wales, for his eldest son and heir-apparent.5
However, Edward I’s vision encompassed even more than this. He had turned on the independent, sovereign kingdom of Scotland, a potential threat to his own northern shires. He had exploited the sudden, unexpected demise of Alexander III when,
in March 1286, the young Scottish king had died in a riding accident. Edward immediately intervened, acting the honest broker,
trying to mediate between the different claimants to the Scottish throne. Alexander had left only a young girl as his heir,
Margaret the Maid of Norway, but she, too, died unexpectedly during her return to Scotland. The two principal claimants to
the vacant throne were the noble Scottish families, the Comyns and the Balliols. Edward played one off against the other until
he tired of the game and showed his true hand: Scotland was to be conquered and brought firmly under the English Crown so
Edward marched north with his cavalry, pikemen, hobelars, men-at-arms and archers.
York became his military base as well as the seat of government. Forsaking London and his palace at Westminster, the king
moved to York the great courts, Kings Bench and the Court of Common Pleas, not the mention the Chancery and the Exchequer
under its flinty-eyed Keeper, Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Edward turned York into his new capital, the
mustering point for his troops. Then he moved across his northern march to wage total war, in the words of the ancient Consuls
of Rome, ‘by land and sea, by fire and sword’. It was a fierce, bloodthirsty struggle. Scotland had produced its own resistance
fighters led by William Wallace and Simon Fraser who, time and again, defeated the English in sudden ambush, sly sortie and
even pitch battle.6
Wallace’s resistance surfaced in 1296 when Edward was at his most vulnerable, facing the two power blocs he truly feared:
Philip IV of France and the powerful Church of Rome. Philip was as ambitious as Edward with his own vision of France’s preeminence
in Europe. The French king exploited Edward’s difficulties in Scotland to raise the vexed question of Gascony, that rich,
wine-producing province in south-west France, the only real relic of the Angevin Empire so abruptly lost by Edward I’s grandfather,
John, in 1214. The power of the Catholic Church proved equally threatening. Edward experienced serious difficulties with his
own bishops and senior clergy. Not only had the clergy and many of the monastic communities grown fat, lax and corrupt but,
led by Robert de Winchelesea, Archbishop of Canterbury, they also stubbornly resisted Edward I’s desire to tax the church.
This eventually brought the English Crown into conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. If Edward feared a war over Gascony with
France, he was equally wary of conflict with the papacy. His grandfather King John had been excommunicated by the powerful
Pope Innocent III. This had turned John into an outcast both at home and abroad, his Crown becoming the plaything for his
own barons as well as foreign princes. Edward I did not want to go down that path.
The Church was a powerful international corporation. Edward depended on its bishops for moral and financial support, not to
mention the smooth running of the machinery of state. Moreover, the Church comprised more than its bishops. Every village
had its own chapel whilst the monasteries and friaries of the different orders – Carthusians, Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans,
Augustinians and Dominicans – were many and rich, their members a powerful force for accepting royal authority or rejecting
it.
Desperate to continue his war with Scotland and keeping an eagle eye on France, Edward I eventually reached an accommodation
of sorts with the Archbishop. However, Church and State continued to watch each other warily especially as the cost of the
King’s wars in Scotland and elsewhere soared.7 Edward had to send troops, not only to Scotland but also to Gascony, and order his ships to patrol the Narrow Seas of the
Channel where Norman pirates, displaying ‘Beaussons, streamers of red sandal’ sent a message, well known amongst mariners,
that it. . .
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