Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, was appointed Master of the Jewels in 1532, and under his supervision the jewel house at the Tower of London was rebuilt.   On St George’s Day 1668, Samuel Pepys took a group of female friends to the Tower, ‘and showed them all to be seen there, and, among other things, the Crown and Sceptres and rich plate, which I myself never saw before, and indeed in noble, and I mightily pleased with it’.  Many of these items were new, having been made for Charles II because the medieval jewels had been broken up in the Interregnum.

Colonel Thomas Blood (1618-1679) was a particularly cool criminal who wormed his way into friendship with the Keeper of the Crown Jewels, Talbot Edwards.  Knocking Edwards on the head with a mallet, Blood flattened the crown for ease of carrying with a second blow, and ran out with it.  With cries of ‘treason!’ being raised, Blood was captured, and later summed up his feat with understatement as ‘a bold attempt, but it was for a crown’.