The man who tried to steal the Crown Jewels in 1671 was caught with the crown flattened under his coat, and the king gave him a pension instead of a rope

On 9 May 1671 a man in a parson's gown walked into the Martin Tower at the Tower of London, hit the Keeper of the Jewels over the head with a mallet, and left with the crown of England flattened under his coat. He got about as far as the wharf.

The setup had taken weeks. Thomas Blood was an Anglo-Irish officer who had already tried to seize Dublin Castle and had later attempted to kidnap the Duke of Ormonde, so this was not a first offence in any sense. He had been visiting the Tower in clerical dress with a woman playing his wife. The Keeper, Talbot Edwards, was an old soldier who lived above the jewel house with his family and showed the regalia to paying visitors, which was the ordinary arrangement at the time. Blood cultivated him across several visits and eventually proposed a marriage between Edwards's daughter and a wealthy nephew who did not exist.

On the morning of the theft the nephew was to be introduced. Blood arrived with three men, Edwards was struck and stabbed, and the party went to work on objects that were never designed to be carried anywhere. The crown was beaten flat enough to go under a cloak. The orb went down a man's breeches. The sceptre would not fit in the bag at all, so one of them laid it on the floor and set about sawing it in half.

What stopped them was not security. It was Edwards's son arriving home unannounced from abroad at the wrong moment. The old man, bleeding, got up and shouted. The party ran, were chased along the wharf, and were taken with the regalia still on them.

Then comes the part I cannot explain, and I have not found anyone who convincingly can. Blood refused to answer to anybody but the king, and he was granted that. He was brought to Charles II, and instead of being hanged for an armed assault on the crown of England he was pardoned, given back estates in Ireland he had lost, and put on a pension reported at five hundred pounds a year. He then lived openly in London as a man people pointed at in the street.

The explanations offered fall into three families and not one of them rests on a document. That the king was charmed by the sheer nerve of it, which is the version told at the time and the least likely to be the whole of it. That Blood knew enough about other people's plots to be more useful alive and talking than dead. Or that he had already been working for the crown in some capacity, and the affair was closer to an arrangement than to a crime.

I lean towards the second because it explains the pension, and charm does not. A king amused by a rogue lets him walk. He does not put him on the payroll for the rest of his life.

If anyone here knows of an actual document that settles this rather than an anecdote that has been repeated since the seventeenth century, I would rather be corrected than keep believing the version I find tidiest.

Sources: The National Archives hold the state papers relating to Blood and publish a document based education resource built on them, which is the closest thing to a primary route in for a general reader. One caution worth stating. The Tower of London's own account and almost every popular retelling descend from the same small set of seventeenth century sources, so the fact that they agree with each other is not independent confirmation of anything.