The Irish Crown Jewels, missing since 1907

On Saturday 6 July 1907, shortly after two in the afternoon, a messenger at the Office of Arms in Dublin Castle found the safe closed but not locked. The jewels of the Order of St Patrick were gone. They had last been seen on 11 June. Dublin Castle says they went missing four days before King Edward VII was due to visit. Lord Castletown was to be made a knight of the Order, wearing them.

The Order was an Irish order of knighthood, founded in 1783. Its Grand Master was the Viceroy, the King’s representative in Ireland. Dublin Castle describes a diamond star, a diamond badge and the collars of five knights, with 394 stones in all. They were kept in a safe in the Office of Arms, in the Bedford Tower. Jewellery of the custodian’s mother was also taken.

The custodian was Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King of Arms, the chief herald of Ireland. Dublin Castle says he held both keys to the safe, one on his person and one at his home. The lock had not been forced, so Dublin Castle reports that the theft is widely held to be an inside job. In the House of Commons on 13 August 1907, Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell said the jewels had not been traced, recovered or redeemed. On 23 January 1913 he said the police had found no evidence on which anyone could be charged. No one has ever been charged. The Irish Times reports that a confidential police report is said to have named a suspect, and that it no longer exists.

A Viceregal Commission sat from 6 January 1908. The National Archives in Kew record that it was to examine the loss and to ask whether Vicars had taken due care. It did not have to find the thief. It sat in private, and witnesses were not sworn. It found that Vicars had not shown due vigilance or proper care, and he was removed. Birrell told the Commons that no criminal charge had ever been made against him. Vicars was shot dead by the IRA in County Kerry on 14 April 1921. The motive is disputed.

Every suspect below is a theory. None is proven. The Irish Times reports that Vicars’s will named Francis Shackleton, the Dublin Herald and deputy at the Office of Arms, as the thief. He was the brother of the explorer Ernest Shackleton. He was never charged over the jewels, and the Irish Independent reports that the Commission cleared him by name. The historian Sean J Murphy, in the Irish Independent in 2008, judged him the thief. Bulmer Hobson, an Irish nationalist, recalled being told in 1908 that Shackleton and Captain Richard Gorges sold the stones in Amsterdam. Gorges was never charged. Hobson gave this to the Bureau of Military History from memory, about forty years later.

Dublin Castle also reports that Lord Haddo, the Viceroy’s son, may have taken them as a prank, and that a Unionist plot may lie behind the theft. Haddo was never charged. Neither claim is verified. The historian Myles Dungan has suggested the stones were broken up and sold.

The jewels have never been recovered. The Irish Times said on 26 October 2025 that they have never been found and that no culprit has been named.