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 Restoration
• The failed plot to storm Dublin Castle and the violent ambush of the Duke of Ormond
• The patient con on Talbot Edwards that set up the May 1671 Tower of London heist
• Four competing theories for King Charles II’s baffling pardon and reward
• His later ruin in a lawsuit with Buckingham and the exhumation to confirm he was truly dead