Irish crown jewels
There were never any traditional Crown Jewels of Ireland , however the jeweled insignia of the Most Exalted Order of St. Patrick were so titled. They were worn by the sovereign and head of the order when the knights came together and reinstalled them. This order is the Irish equivalent of the Order of the Garter and the Scottish Order of the Thistle . The theft of these jewels from Dublin Castle in 1907 has not yet been solved.
history
King George III founded the Order of St. Patrick in 1783. The badges of the order included a breast star and a sash pendant. The respective royal pieces of the sovereign and head of the order were preciously made with rubies , emeralds and Brazilian diamonds .
theft
In 1903 the treasures were to be brought to safe rooms specially furnished for them. But it turned out that the safe was too big for the front door. Hence, the jewelry was deposited in the vault of the Office of the Officer of Arms of Dublin Castle, Sir Arthur Vicars . The seven keys to the office door were in the care of Vicars and his staff, and two more keys were in Vicars' possession.
Vicars was known to get drunk on a regular basis and he woke once with the jewels around his neck. It is not known whether this was a joke or an act typical of him.
On July 6, 1907, four days before the state visit of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to Dublin, it was found that the crown jewels had been stolen from the safe. It is reported that the king was very upset but did not cancel the visit.
Vicars publicly reported the second agent, Francis Shackleton (brother of the explorer Ernest Shackleton ) in the subsequent investigations . Shackleton was acquitted and Vicars was found not to have been vigilant enough or to have lacked proper sense of duty as the keeper of the regalia. Arthur Vicars was shot dead by the IRA on April 14, 1921 .
Theft in literature
The case was never officially resolved. But as early as 1908, the famous author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a variant of the theft in the Sherlock Holmes short story The Bruce-Partington Plans , which was published in Strand Magazine and later in the anthology His Farewell Presentation 1917. Instead of the jewels, submarine plans are the stolen goods. However, similarities are put together very meticulously.
The last publication was in 2010 by Sean Marshall , entitled The Patricius Enigma . The fictional story is not only about the two important protagonists, the jewels and their theft, but also about their whereabouts.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dublin Castle History ( Memento of the original dated May 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
literature
- Francis Bamford, Viola Bankes: Vicious Circle. The Case of The Missing Irish Crown Jewels. Horizon Press, New York NY 1967.
- Tim Coates (Ed.): The Theft of the Irish Crown Jewels. Tim Coates, Lonson 2002, ISBN 1-84381-007-7 .
- Sean Marshall: The Patricius Enigma. CreateSpace , sl, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4538-0470-4 .