Stolen Crown Jewels, Séances, Salacious Sex Scandals – And Sherlock Holmes?
With the recent Paris jewel theft still making headlines Patrick Ryan finds an even more intriguing Irish tale with a link to the greatest detective character in crime fiction.
The recent theft of France’s crown jewels from the Apollo Room of the Louvre Museum launched not only a manhunt for the villains across the Eternal City’s underworld but a million memes online featuring famous crimefighters recruited to help the Préfecture de Police de Paris.
Poirot, Columbo – even Clouseau – appeared in the gags but nearly 120 years earlier when Ireland had been at the centre of a similar media storm following the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels the father of an even greater fictional detective offered his services to Dublin’s coppers.
Despite his Edinburgh upbringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always referred to himself as an “Irishman by default” thanks to his deep Catholic roots here, and the creator of Sherlock Holmes was certainly motivated to uncover the truth as the man blamed for the crime was none other than his friend, distant cousin, namesake and fellow knight of the realm, Sir Arthur Vicars.
“It was one of the mass media sensations of its day, in Ireland and beyond – the combination of spectacular royal jewels, an apparently perfect crime, and rampant speculation about the possible involvement of senior figures of the Irish and English establishment meant that it received enormous press coverage, resulting in at least one libel case as a result of over-enthusiastic theorising about the culprits,” declares Stephanie Rains, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Maynooth University.
The “Irish Crown Jewels” as they were known since 1905 were actually the glittering silver star and badge worn at banquets by of the head of Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick, the Lord Lieutenant (or Viceroy) whose role under British rule was similar to that of Uachtarán na hÉireann from 1938 onwards.
William IV presented the order with the gongs, encrusted with 395 Brazilian diamonds, emeralds and rubies which had once been part of the English Crown Jewels, in 1831. A rocksolid reminder of the power and pomp of the union, until 1903 the regalia had been stored securely in a jeweler’s vault when not in use but when the Office of Arms was transferred from the Bermingham Tower to the Bedford (“Clock”) Tower in Dublin Castle they were also moved, to a safe in the newly constructed strongroom.
Unfortunately the safe wouldn’t fit through the door and instead it was placed in the very public library and office of Sir Arthur Vicars, the Ulster King of Arms whose main interest was heraldy and who resented this new security duty. He was also a man fond of a jar – and apparently of leaving doors ajar when sozzled – meaning the regalia was regularly at risk unless locked away with one of the only two keys.
Still, Dublin Castle was full of armed soldiers and police, so the risk seemed minimal. Indeed the normally fastidious Vicars had ignored several security breeches in the preceeding months and the treasures had been the subject of a number of practical jokes by the likes of Lord Haddo, the son of the Lord Lieutenant and Earl of Aberdeen (John Campbell Gordon), who even smuggled the set out the building.
The theft of the Irish Crown Jewels, along with the bejewelled collars of five knights of the order and personal jewelry belonging to Vickers was first spotted by messenger William Stivey when he returned other valuables to the safe on Saturday afternoon, July 6th.
There was no sign of forced entry and two screws has been loosened to separate a ribbon and clasp, which had been left behind and the Dublin Metropolitan Police began a formal investigation into what seemed an inside job.
By Monday the police flyers offered a £1,000 reward (£154,000/€175,000 now) for recovery of the items, a fraction of their estimated £4m/€4.4m value in today’s money just four days before the arrival of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to the Irish International Exhibition and the investitude of Lord Castletown, Bernard FitzPatrick, a soldier with a keen interest in Celtic history, was set to into the Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick. The ceremony was postponed. Edward was furious and demanded resignations, en masse.
“’His rage was something terrible and fearful… I am sure the officials he lectured never forgot his words,’” revealed a member of the king’s staff, quoted by Matt Fox in a piece for BBC Northern Ireland in 2022.
One of Scotland Yard’s leading men was Irish and Detective Chief Inspector John Kane arrived a few days later to help. Leaks suggest he quickly identified the culprit though his report was never officially released, apparently suppressed by the DMP and RIC. The reason?
Dublin Castle had been the scene of homosexual orgies in 1884 and the king was keenly aware of the current rumours after the similar Eulenburg Affair had rocked Germany in 1906, deeply embarrassing Kaiser William II. Even worse Edward VII’s bisexual brother-in-law the Duke of Argyll had attended parties at the castle and was probably involved.
The popular press had a field day and even the New York Times carried regular updates on the jewel theft. A séance was organised: the spirits revealed that the haul was buried in a graveyard outside the capital…
Vicars had the scene dug up, to no avail.
The Leprechaun, a satirical Dublin magazine which counted James Joyce among it’s contributors, ran a piece with a cartoon showing the grinning thief brazenly walking out the main gate of HQ wearing the jewels and being saluted by the copper on duty while a G Man (police intelligence officer) looks on.
“Doctor Conan Doyle, on his arrival at Kingstown, at once purchased a copy of ‘Sinn Fein’ from ‘Sir’ Davy Stephens, which indicates that he is already in possession of a clue of great importance,” the writer joked, suggesting that even Stephens, a popular local newspaper seller knew the score.
Arthur Vicars refused both to resign and to appear in front of the toothless Viceregal Commission insisting instead on a public Royal Commission which could subpoena witnesses. He also openly accused his second-in-command, the Dublin Herald of Arms Francis Shackleton, the shady younger brother of the Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, whom he mentored and shared a house (and probably a bed) with of being the thief.
Shackleton was by then in debt to loan sharks but was predictably exonerated by the commission which found that Vicars did “not exercise due vigilance or proper care as the custodian of the regalia”. It forced his resignation, and that of all staff in his personal employ leading him to refer in his will many years later to the time “when I was made a scapegoat to save other departments responsible and when they shielded the real culprit and thief, Francis R. Shackleton.”
The journalist and Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB – precursors to the IRA) member Bulmer Hobson, who swore Padraig Pearse into the organisation, spotted an opportunity. He wrote a piece in The Gaelic American, based on information from Arthur Vicars’s half-brother, Pierce O’Mahony who called the jewels, once owned by the king’s mistress “polluted baubles . . . the refuse of the British Crown”.
The article blamed Shackleton and Captain Richard Gorges, who had at one point been discharged by the army for sodomy, for the theft. O’Mahony was eccentric – he joined the Bulgarian Ortodox Church and lived later as an Irish chieftan wearing a saffron kilt, and attended by bagpipers and wolfhounds – but he was a philanthropist and a barrister too, and Hobson trusted him.
The IRB man wrote that the duo plied Vicars with whiskey until he collapsed, slipped off his key and opened the safe, before Shackleton travelled with the gems to Amsterdam where he sold them for £20,000 (£3.1m/€3.5m today).
Homosexuality was still a serious crime and The Gaelic American said Shackleton and his friends “were men suspected of unspeakable and disgusting offences.” According to Hobson the brother of the famous Arctic explorer when confronted by the police with allegations of theft threatened to make the castle carry on public.
Home Rule Party leader John Redmond was asked to support Vicars but he refused based on the sexual element of the story. Among those who did back this theory was radical Home Rule MP and lawyer Laurence Ginnell, who later was elected as a TD for Sinn Féin. British officials certainly knew about the private lives of Shackleton, Gorges and Vicars but were fearful that if they pushed the matter their dirty linen might be washed in public and terrified by what the press would say about Lord Haddo and the Duke of Argyll joining men in orgies at HQ.
Other theories were suggested, perhaps to distract from the truth. Some muttered that it was all a Conservative plot to discredit the Liberal government, that the jewels had been sold by another insider to the American financier JP Morgan, that they were stolen by the IRB to raise funds for arms…
The prominent Nationalist MP Pat O’Brien put the blame squarely on “loyal and patriotic Unionist criminals” intent on embarrassing the Lord Lieutenant, a known sympathiser of Home Rule.
Haddo and Vicars were both accused by the newspapers and in 1913 Conan Doyle’s cousin successfully sued the Daily Mail which alleged he’d allowed a non-existant mistress a key to the safe and she’d later fled to Paris with the loot.
Arthur Vicars spent his remaining years as a recluse in a manor house in Co Kerry until in April, 1921 armed IRA men shot him dead and razed the building in retribution for ignoring warnings not to help crown forces.
Shackleton’s fall from grace was a tale in itself. Lord Ronald Gower was a writer, sculptor and former MP, regarded as inspiration for Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and another likely lover of the Duke of Argyll.
In the lead in to the Great War the now bankrupt Shackleton defrauded Gower of his fortune of £60,000 (almost £9m today) in a fake bonds scheme for which he was prosecuted and imprisoned, but for stealing a far smaller sum from a spinster friend of the sculptor. After his release Shackleton changed his name and became an antiques dealer in Chichester, England, until his death in June, 1941.
What of his likely co-conspirator and lover Richard Gorges? In July 1915 the former soldier and policeman sensationally shot and killed Detective Sergeant Arthur Young when he tried to arrest the Irishman for “indulgence in illegal sexual practices” half-a-mile from a popular same-sex cruising spot at Hampstead, London.
Gorges served 10 years for manslaughter before being released and imprisoned again after passing a dud cheque in 1941. Three years later he was conveniently run over by a train on the London Tube, dying of his injuries and ending any chance of a tell-all memoir.
The Dublin haul was never recovered though James Weldon a prominent city jeweller received a letter detailing account their whereabouts from someone he identified as Francis Shackleton. Another letter followed years later and ssecretly WT Cosgrave, President of the new Executive Council of the Irish Free was willing to pay up.
“They’re ours anyway, so we might as well have them,” he reasoned.
Was it real? Could they have been recovered? Perhaps.
“However, they would have become the property of the British monarchy, like the Irish Sword of State,” explains the OPW on dublincastle.ie.
Many claimed the jewels had been hidden somewhere in the Clock Tower, which eventually became structurally unsound so when the renamed Genealogical Office was relocated in 1983 the Chief Herald of Ireland Donal Begley carefully supervised the removal of walls and floorboards in the hope the rumours were true, but they proved just another tall tale.
In December, 1908 a new short story from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle had appeared and in The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans Sherlock Holmes fans immediately noticed similarities between this latest mystery and the heist.
Perhaps there is a final chapter in the real story yet to be told.
Forget the Chief Herald, Interpol or Scotland Yard though. After the success of House of Guinness we’re putting our money on Netflix.
Pass the popcorn – and be careful with those family jewels.
