The Crown Jewels of Scotland — The 500-Year Secret That Cromwell Couldn't Destroy.

On a cliff top on the northeast coast of Scotland, in the early months of 1652, a small garrison was starving. Cromwell's guns had been pounding Dunatar Castle for the better part of a year, and locked inside those walls sat the crown, the scepter, and the sword of an entire kingdom. Everyone there knew what would happen when it fell. The English Republic had already seized the crown jewels of England and melted them into coins. The Scottish regalia were next. What happened instead began with a minister's wife, a basket, and a hole dug beneath a church floor. This is the story of the Honours of Scotland, the oldest crown jewels in the British Isles, and among the oldest anywhere in Europe. If you love these histories, thank you for being here. Your likes and comments genuinely keep this channel going. Subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss what comes next. The Crown of Scotland. Start with the crown itself, because it's older than almost anyone expects. The gold circlet you can see today in Edinburgh Castle was finished in 1540, but that isn't really the beginning of the story. Scottish kings had been shown wearing crowns since the reign of Edgar, around the year 1100, and the metal in this one almost certainly carries pieces of an earlier crown going back to the time of Robert the Bruce. By 1540 that older crown was in trouble. An inventory the year before had recorded damage, including a fleur-de-lis that had simply gone missing. So James V handed the job to John Moseman, a goldsmith of the Edinburgh Incorporation of Goldsmiths. Moseman took the old crown apart, melted down the circlet, and rebuilt it with recycled gemstones and roughly 1.2 kilograms of Scottish gold, dug from the goldfields of Upper Clydesdale. Modern testing has shown that gold to be 21 carat. He delivered the finished crown to the king at Holyrood on the 7th of February, 1540, and James wore it for the first time two weeks later, at the coronation of his queen, Mary of Guise. Look closely and it's almost a small map of the kingdom's ideas about itself. Alternating fleur-de-lis and crosses run around the band. Four arches rise to a blue enamelled orb scattered with gold stars, meant to be the night sky, which James is thought to have bought on a visit to Paris. On top sits a cross set with pearls and a large amethyst, and enamelled on its lower arm are the letters Junior V, James, King, V. As for exactly how many stones and pearls it holds, the sources don't agree. Historic Environment Scotland, which cares for it now, counts 94 pearls and 43 gemstones. The royal household describes it differently again. Jewelry writers land somewhere in between. What everyone agrees on is the character of the thing. Dozens of Scottish freshwater river pearls, more than 40 gemstones, garnets, amethysts, and others lifted straight from that earlier crown, and a weight of about 1.64 kilograms, resting on a bonnet of velvet and ermine. Even the bonnet has changed over the years, from the original purple to the deep crimson you see today. The Sceptre of Scotland. The sceptre beside it came from Rome. According to tradition it was a gift from Pope Alexander VI to James IV in 1494, a mark of favour towards Scotland as a loyal daughter of the Church. That date isn't completely settled. Some accounts point to an earlier gift, around 1491, from Pope Innocent VIII, but the papal origin isn't in doubt. It's Italian work in the High Renaissance style, and it replaced an older Scottish sceptre that's now lost. In 1536 the Edinburgh goldsmith Adam Leys lengthened it and added James V initials, so it, too, has been reshaped over time. It's a little under 90 centimetres now, a hexagonal silver gilt rod engraved with thistles, leaves and small grotesque figures. But the part to look at is the head. Stylised dolphins, old symbols of the Church, curl beneath three tiny figures standing under Gothic canopies. The Virgin Mary, crowned and holding the infant Christ, St James, with his staff, and St Andrew, holding his saltire, the diagonal cross that became Scotland's flag. Above them sits a polished globe of rock crystal, and above that, a single large Scottish freshwater pearl. You'll sometimes hear that crystal called a cairngorm, the smoky Scottish quartz. It isn't. It's clear rock crystal, and that particular mistake has a habit of spreading. This is the same sceptre that, in 1707, was used to touch the printed Act of Union, the last time it ever played a part in an act of Scottish government. The Sword of State. The sword has the biggest personality of the three, and by far the most damage. It was another papal gift, this time from Pope Julius II in 1507, sent to James IV along with a blessed hat as thanks for defending the faith. The Pope's own craftsman in Italy, a man named Domenico de' Asutri, made it. The blade runs about a metre long, etched on both sides with St Peter and St Paul and inlaid in gold with the words Julius II Pont Max, Julius II, Supreme Pontiff. The silver gilt handle is worked with oak leaves and acorns, the crossguard curves into a pair of dolphins, and the scabbard is bound in crimson velvet stamped with Julius's papal arms. And then there's what happened to it. The blade is broken. It was most likely snapped in two when the honours were hidden from Cromwell in the 1650s, and though it was mended, it never truly recovered. Modern conservators also blame slow corrosion from lead. Historic Environment Scotland now calls it too fragile to use, retired from service with the monarch's consent. Even the sword's belt has its own escape story. It went missing for well over a century, and was eventually found built into a garden wall at Beres Castle in Aberdeenshire, of all the places for it to end up. What they were made to do. For all their beauty, these three objects were built to do one thing, crown a monarch. The first time they were used together was in September 1543, at Stirling, for a queen who was nine months old. That was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was far too young to wear the crown, so Cardinal David Beaton held it while the great lords carried the sceptre and the sword in procession. An English observer sniffed that the whole thing was not very costly. 24 years later, in 1567, the same regalia crowned Mary's son, James VI, 13 months old, lifted to the throne after his mother was forced to abdicate. John Knox preached the sermon that day, choosing the story of a boy king from the Book of Kings. Charles I was crowned King of Scots at Holyrood in 1633, seven years after his English coronation. The little gold flask made to hold his anointing oil still survives in a museum in Edinburgh. And then, on the 1st of January 1651, Charles II was crowned at Scone, in a stern Presbyterian service where the new king was made to swear an oath to the covenant before anyone would bring the crown near him. It was the last coronation ever held in Scotland. No monarch since has worn them. They are presented instead, set on a cushion, not a head. Between those coronations, the honours had another job. After 1603, when James VI moved south to become James I of England as well, the throne of Scotland stood empty for most of the year. So the crown, sceptre, and sword were carried up the royal mile and set on a table before that empty throne, standing in for the absent king whenever the Scottish Parliament saturday. When Parliament passed a law, the sceptre was touched to the printed act to signal royal assent. The very last time that happened was in 1707, at the ratification of the Union, and after that, the Parliament of Scotland ceased to exist. The first hiding, Cromwell, Dunatar, and Kynneff. Which brings us back to that starving garrison on the cliff. When Charles II was crowned in 1651, the honours turned into a target. Cromwell had already destroyed England's crown jewels. The Scottish ones were the obvious next prize. Edinburgh Castle had fallen to his forces, so the regalia couldn't be kept there. Instead they were smuggled north to Dunatar Castle, hidden in sacks of wool and carried by a woman named Catherine Drummond. Cromwell's troops surrounded the place. The small garrison held out for months, but the end was coming, and a plan was made to get the honours out before it did. One woman, Anne Lindsay, had already walked straight through the besieging lines with the king's private papers sewn into her clothes. Getting the crown itself out would be harder, and here the story splits into versions that have never quite been reconciled. The honest thing is to tell you all of them. In her own account, given years later, Christian Fletcher, the wife of the minister at nearby Kynneff, said she carried the crown, sceptre, and sword out herself, hidden among sacks of goods, across three separate visits to the castle. A second, older tradition says the regalia were lowered down the sea cliffs to the beach, where a servant woman pretending to gather seaweed collected them and carried them off in her creel. And then there's the version Sir Walter Scott loved to tell, the one that found its way into so many books. The minister's wife walking out through the English lines with the crown hidden under her skirts, her maid carrying the rest in a bundle of flax, and the English commander gallantly helping her up onto her horse. Pick whichever version you like. What's certain is the ending. The honours were buried beneath the floor of Kynneff Old Kirk, and there they lay for around nine years. The minister and his wife are said to have quietly lifted them every few months, aired them, and buried them again so the damp wouldn't ruin them. Dunnatar surrendered in May 1652. Cromwell's men tore the castle apart looking for the regalia and found nothing. A false rumour had been put about that the honours were already overseas, and the hunt was called off. There's a bitter footnote to all of it. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 and the honours came back up from under the church floor, the credit went to the people. A nobleman was rewarded for supposedly smuggling them abroad, which never happened. Christian Fletcher, who actually did the thing, was voted a sum of money by Parliament for her courage. The records don't show a single payment ever reaching her. The second hiding, forgotten, then found. The second disappearance was quieter, and in some ways stranger. After the Act of Union in 1707 folded the Scottish and English parliaments into one, the honours had nothing left to do. There was no Scottish Parliament for them to attend. The treaty promised they would stay in Scotland for all time, so they were wrapped in linen, locked inside a great oak chest in a room at Edinburgh Castle, and then the room itself was walled up. And they were simply forgotten. Over the next hundred years, a rumour hardened into common belief that the English had quietly carried them off to London after all. There's a story that in 1794 a castle officer got into the sealed room, knocked on the old chest, heard nothing move inside, and left convinced it was empty. The man who wouldn't let it go was Sir Walter Scott, by then one of the famous novelists alive. He was certain the honours were still in that chest, and he talked the future George IV into letting him prove it. A royal warrant came through in late 1817, and on the 4th of February 1818, Scott and a small group of officials broke through the wall into the room no one had entered in over a century, and opened the chest. For a moment they thought it really was empty. Then they lifted the linen. The crown, the sceptre, and the sword were lying exactly where they had been left 111 years earlier. Scott wrote that same day that the regalia had been found in perfect preservation, though the sword and sceptre carried the marks of hard handling somewhere in their past. They raised the royal flag over the castle to tell the city. Within a year, for the first time in generations, ordinary people could walk in and see them. There was one more surprise in that chest. Lying beside the crown, sceptre and sword was a slender silver gilt wand, about a metre long, topped with a crystal and a cross and stamped with the initials of a maker no one has ever managed to identify. Nobody is entirely sure what it was for. Scott himself guessed it might once have been carried before the Lord High Treasurer. It's still in the crown room today. Its purpose an open question. Four years after that, Scott arranged something even more theatrical. In 1822, George IV came to Edinburgh, the first reigning monarch to set foot in Scotland in almost 200 years, and the honours were carried in procession to meet him at the palace of Holyroodhouse. That piece of stage-managed pageantry is the direct ancestor of the ceremony still used today, when the honours are carried in and set before a new monarch. The third hiding, against Hitler. You'd think three centuries of drama would be enough for any set of duels. But the honours were hidden one more time, and this time against Hitler. When war broke out in 1939, the regalia were taken down into the basement of the palace block at the castle, packed away and covered with sandbags in case of bombing. As the fear of a German invasion grew, that stopped feeling safe enough. So they were buried, properly buried, in the medieval ruins of David's Tower, deep inside the castle rock. The crown and the Stuart jewels were sealed into zinc-lined containers and hidden under the floor of an old latrine. The sceptre, the sword, and a mysterious silver wand were bricked up inside a wall. And because everyone at the castle might be killed in an invasion, sketch maps of the hiding places were drawn up and handed to just four people. The King, the Secretary of State for Scotland, the King's Remembrancer, and, remarkably, the Governor-General of Canada, so that if Britain fell, a copy of the secret would survive on the far side of the Atlantic. The sources disagree on the exact year of the burial. Historic Environment Scotland dates it to 1942, while the Royal Household says 1941. Either way, the invasion never came. After the war, the honours were dug up and carried back to their room, and there they have stayed. The honours today, and one stone that isn't gold. One more object sits in this story, and it isn't gold at all, the Stone of Destiny, a plain block of sandstone weighing about 150 kilograms, the ancient stone that Scottish kings were enthroned on at Scone. In 1296, Edward I of England hauled it south and built it into the coronation chair at Westminster, a blunt way of saying that England's kings would rule Scotland too. It sat under English and British monarchs for 700 years. On Christmas Day 1950, four Glasgow students actually stole it back, breaking it in the process. It turned up months later at Arbroath Abbey. The stone was formally returned to Scotland in 1996, and now sits in the new museum at Perth, close to where it began. It made the journey south just once more, briefly, for the coronation of Charles III in 2023. As for the honours themselves, they're still working objects. In 1953, after her London coronation, they were presented to Elizabeth II at a service in St Giles Cathedral. Presented, note, not used to crown her, a distinction the palace was careful to keep. Seventy years later, in July 2023, they were presented in the same cathedral to Charles III. The crown was carried by the Duke of Hamilton, whose family has held that hereditary honour for generations. But the old Sword of States stayed in its case. Too fragile now to lift safely, it was replaced by a brand new sword, the Elizabeth Sword, made in memory of the late Queen. It's pommel-cut from ancient Hebridean rock, it's scabbard from Perth sheer oak, it's blade engraved with the old Scottish motto, In my defends God me defend. The crown has acquired a modern life, too. It's carried into Edinburgh at the opening of each new session of the Scottish Parliament, in a deliberate echo of those old processions before the empty throne. And in September 2022, it was laid on the coffin of Elizabeth II as she rested in St Giles, watched by a queue of mourners that stretched across the city. The crown room holds more than the three honours, and some of what's in there is pure jewellery. There are the Stuart jewels, a locket, a jewelled collar and a ruby ring that James VII carried into exile in 1688, and which only came home to Scotland in 1830. And there are the Lorne jewels, a diamond and pearl necklace, locket and pendant. The necklace alone set with something like 190 diamonds and 13 pearls, showing the ancient galley of Lorne and the Argyll family motto, Aeneobla Viscaris, do not forget. They were left to the nation in 1939 by Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's headstrong, artistic daughter, who had married into the House of Argyll and was herself a trained sculptor, with public statues to her name in London and Montreal. Decades later, in 2023, conservators cleaned and studied the honours under microscopes for the first time in their entire history, as part of that same year's major conservation project. Among the things they found were gem settings pinned and repinned in different ways at different points across the centuries, proof of every repair made across five hundred years, pin by pin. Five centuries. Three child monarchs crowned, one last king at Scone, and then never again. They went under a church floor to cheat Cromwell. They went behind a bricked-up wall for a hundred years. And when the threat was the Luftwaffe, they went underground a third time. A lot of crown jewels don't make it through one revolution, let alone three centuries of upheaval. These did, because a handful of people, a minister's wife, a stubborn novelist, for officials with a secret map, decided, one at a time, that they were worth the risk. They're in the crown room of Edinburgh Castle today. If you ever find yourself there, go and stand in front of them for a moment. Thank you for watching, and tell me in the comments which of the three hidings surprised you most.