Fortune and Glory

by David McIntee

  Nevertheless, it was spectacularly obvious to everyone that it was an inside job. Despite this, Vicars continued to pronounce that none of his staff would or could have done it. This means either he was incredibly blind or did it himself. The latter option is easily possible: of the two keys to the safe, one was always on Vicars’s person, and the other was a spare he kept at home. One of them was used in the robbery.

  Of the available Heralds, Mahony hadn’t been in to the office until 4 July, and neither Shackleton nor Goldney had even been in Ireland at any point between 11 June and 6 July, when the robbery took place. This didn’t look good for Vicars.

  The king, Edward VII, was getting annoyed and also felt it was an inside job. He wanted Vicars out, and although the lord lieutenant was on Vicars’s side, he couldn’t disobey a direct order from his royal boss. Therefore, on 23 October, Vicars was suspended, as were Goldney, Mahony and Shackleton.

  Feeling betrayed, Vicars called for a full public inquiry to be held in an attempt to clear his name. His step-brother, Pierce O’Mahony – Pierce Gun Mahony’s father – stepped in to help out. He had been a Nationalist MP and called for the issue to be raised in the House of Commons. Irish MPs refused on the grounds that an inquiry might throw too much light on rumours of gay orgies among the Office of Arms’ staff. Eventually, however, the Knights of the Order of St Patrick themselves petitioned the king for an inquiry. The king, under the advisement of the lord lieutenant, established a court of enquiry.

  The Crown Jewels Commission (Ireland) was established in January 1908, to investigate the theft and to determine whether Vicars had been negligent. Since the commission was to sit in private, could not subpoena witnesses and could not take evidence under oath, Vicars refused to take part. The commission still had his statements to the police, however. Then the fun really started.

  When it comes to looking at the staff of the Office of Arms as suspects, all manner of interesting quirks began to show.

  Vicars, as it turns out, had a liking for showing off the regalia to visitors, as well as being prone to drinking on an evening shift and storing his own family heirlooms in the safe. Vicars had also acted as a guarantor for the frequently indebted Shackleton, who was always in hock beyond his means and who lived in the house with the spare safe key; surely a possible motive. In fact Vicars had by now decided to finger Shackleton as the culprit to anyone who’d listen, despite the fact that he hadn’t even been in Ireland during the time in which the theft could have taken place. Vicars had even told Chief Inspector Kane that Shackleton did it, but Kane refused to believe this, considering Shackleton’s absence from Ireland at the time, and this was not the person he had named in his missing report.

  Goldney got involved with this setup, at Vicars’s request, becoming a guarantor in dealings with Shackleton’s loan-shark. When Shackleton gave his evidence at the Inquiry, he took pains to point out that he had been accused by tabloid newspapers of conspiring with Lord Haddo to commit the theft – Lord Haddo, of course, being the son of the lord lieutenant, who had set up the Inquiry. Needless to say, the solicitor-general quickly decided that this was a side to the case that didn’t need to be gone into.

  Instead, the commission’s verdict was this: ‘Having fully investigated all the circumstances connected with the loss of the Regalia of the Order of St Patrick, and having examined and considered carefully the arrangements of the Office of Arms in which the Regalia were deposited, and the provisions made by Sir Arthur Vicars, or under his direction, for their safe keeping, and having regard especially to the inactivity of Sir Arthur Vicars on the occasions immediately preceding the disappearance of the Jewels, when he knew that the Office and the Strong Room had been opened at night by unauthorised persons, we feel bound to report to Your Excellency that, in our opinion, Sir Arthur Vicars did not exercise due vigilance or proper care as the custodian of the Regalia.’

  The commission also took great pains to say how much they thought that Shackleton was a really trustworthy fellow, and it was unimaginable that he could have been involved with such a crime. Vicars, Shackleton and Goldney were fired, but Vicars refused to hand over the office keys, forcing his replacement, Neville Wilkinson, to break in in order to start work.

  Mahony was allowed to keep his job, and his father started a campaign to protest Vicars’s innocence and pin the blame on Shackleton, by leaking to the press stories that the establishment wanted rid of Vicars because he had allowed a man of such low character into the job. Vicars, meanwhile, also continued to blame Shackleton, as well as the Board of Works. He claimed his lack of response to being told that his secure doors were being left open was down to pressure of overwork.

  A year after the theft, a Nationalist Irish-American newspaper, the Gaelic American, really got things going in a sensationalist way with more stuff leaked by O’Mahony, when it revealed that drunken gay orgies had been held in the Office of Arms rooms. The paper suggested that Shackleton and a Captain Gaudeons had stolen the regalia and got away with it by threatening to expose the identities of establishment figures involved.

  Shackleton did have a friend named Richard Gorges, who had been a British Army captain, and his reference to Lord Haddo in his testimony to the commission could easily be interpreted as a thinly-veiled ‘I know stuff’ warning to go easy on him.

  The article was written by a Republican Brotherhood member named Bulmer Hobson, and he bumped into Gorges a few years later. Supposedly Gorges admitted that the main details of this story were true, and said that the regalia had once been stolen as a drunken prank by Lord Haddo, who returned them in the morning. According to this version, Shackleton then took them for real and sold them in Amsterdam.

  It’s certainly odd that the commission both went to the extent of singling out Shackleton for praise as being trustworthy, and also considered him of sufficiently low character that association with him was a good reason for firing Vicars.

  So, who did it? Let’s do a Poirot and gather the suspects. Figuring out the truth of the matter will always be difficult, as a surprising number of files and documentation also went walkabout over the years. At least eight Home Office files on the subject were officially destroyed, and the Ulster Office’s official correspondence records between 1902 and 1908 are missing altogether (everything else from that office was replaced by the Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland in 1943), as is Chief Inspector Kane’s ultimate report.

  Shackleton definitely had means and motive: He was a regular debtor, in hock to loan sharks – at one point even his more famous brother Ernest had to borrow £1,000 to help pay off some of his debts – and he was later jailed for fraud (passing a bad cheque) in 1914. He had an office key and lived in the same house as the spare safe key. That said, what he didn’t have was opportunity. Shackleton had left Ireland before 11 June, when the regalia were last seen, and didn’t return until 9 July, three days after the theft had been discovered. So he definitely didn’t take them. It actually appears that most of the vituperation against him was down to his debts and his homosexuality, making him an easy target. That said, he could still have been involved in a conspiracy to commit the theft, perhaps by planning it. There’s no evidence to that effect, however, but it doesn’t stop even most modern commentators from blaming him.

  Gorges has to be a suspect if for no other reason than that he spent a lot of time boasting about having stolen the Irish Crown Jewels to his fellow jailbirds while serving a sentence for manslaughter. None of them believed him, however, as, like Shackleton, he wasn’t in Ireland at the time of the theft. According to his boasts, Shackleton had planned it, inspired by an earlier prank theft, and had taken the jewels to Amsterdam to be sold, with the proviso that they not be broken up for at least three years, in case they wanted to buy them back or ransom them.

  Vicars, as possessor of both keys, is also an obvious suspect, but his belief that first none of his staff can have done it, and then that Shackleton had, suggests that he was psychologically guilt-rid
den over his failure, and relieved to pin the blame on someone. Had he taken the jewels, he’d have had a much more comfortable life after being fired, and would have had no reason to continue blaming Shackleton years later, in his will, as he did.

  Pierce Gun Mahony had little means or opportunity. Motivationally, he was from a Nationalist family, and so if the intent was simply to disrupt a British bit of ceremony, then he could still have been involved in some capacity.

  That leaves us with Francis Bennett Goldney, and here we have a winner. Shackleton might have more access to the spare safe key, but Goldney’s track record as a kleptomaniac (he once took two silver communion cups from Canterbury Cathedral, and sold them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) means he’s the most likely culprit to have actually taken them. He was the newest of the Heralds on the team, having been appointed in February of 1907, and he was the third man in the Vicars/Shackleton debtor’s triangle, which means he undoubtedly visited the house often, and knew the financial situation. Since Vicars had at least once been sufficiently stupefied to have the regalia placed on him without his waking up, it’s not impossible that the safe key could have been lifted from his pocket and replaced without alerting him.

  That Goldney was a thief is not in doubt: he died in a car accident in France in 1918, and when his personal effects and belongings were studied, it turned out that he was in illegal possession of more stolen archive goods – ancient charters and historic documents stolen from Canterbury, and a painting by Romanelli which was the property of the Duke of Bedford until Goldney nicked it.

  It’s still possible that Shackleton and Goldney could have been in cahoots, and, either way, it was likely Goldney who fingered Shackleton as the culprit to Vicars. (Vicars’ statement said a friend had tipped him off about Shackleton’s supposed guilt.)

  Speaking of Canterbury, folklore there suggests a mayoral connection to the theft. Newspaper publisher J. A. Jennings claimed that an anonymous American millionaire staying with Goldney had had a false bottom added to his car’s petrol tank in order to smuggle the jewels in it when they went from Dover to Amsterdam. Interestingly, one John Pierpont Morgan (yes, that J. P. Morgan) was in Canterbury with Goldney in August 1907, and has been retroactively accused elsewhere of smuggling Etruscan artefacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  In the end, Shackleton changed his name to Mellor after his release from prison, and died in 1941.

  Gorges was hit by a train in 1944.

  A very bitter Vicars retired to Kilmorna House in County Kerry, married a Gertrude Wright in 1917, and was murdered by the IRA in 1921. His will wasn’t published until 1976, when it turned out to contain this paragraph: ‘I might have had more to dispose of had it not been for the outrageous way in which I was treated by the Irish Government over the loss of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907, backed up by the late King Edward VII whom I had always loyally and faithfully served, when I was made a scapegoat to save other departments responsible and when they shielded the real culprit and thief Francis R. Shackleton (brother of the explorer who didn’t reach the South Pole). My whole life and work was ruined by this cruel misfortune and by the wicked and blackguardly acts of the Irish Government.’

  Pierce Gun Mahony was, ironically, given his middle name, shot in a supposed hunting accident in 1914.

  As for the 1927 memo about the jewels being for sale, of course when the Irish Free State had been created in 1922, the remaining non-stolen pieces belonging to the Order of St Patrick also became property of the new country, and it’s more likely that these were being offered to Britain for sale – and indeed they were returned to Britain during the 1940s.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  There is a popular view, especially among Irish Nationalists, that the regalia was secretly returned to the British Royal Family shortly afterwards by Loyalists who had taken it to blame on Nationalists. This makes no sense today, with royal regalia being a driving force of the UK tourism industry – such spectacular pieces would draw too many crowds of paying customers to keep secret.

  There are basically two possibilities: the pieces were broken up and the gemstones fenced individually, or, they are still in the hands of the family of some private collector, and after over a century it’s entirely possible that such descendants don’t even know that the pieces in great-granddad’s study actually are these historical artefacts.

  Logically, the former option is more likely. Most jewel thefts are for the cash value of the pieces, and even if the theft was politically motivated by Nationalists, since no ransom demand or propaganda was made of the pieces, it is reasonable to assume that so many gemstones would buy a lot of guns/bribes/printing/whatever. Regardless of whether the motive for the theft was for the cash or for political purposes, the pieces would be very recognizable at the time and very risky to try to sell intact. Dismantling them and taking the individual stones to different fences and buyers would be far safer.

  That said, it isn’t impossible that the pieces could have been stolen to order for a collector for a set price.

  For what it’s worth, the old Ulster’s office library still exists at Dublin Castle (now shared with a conference centre). The Ratner safe from which the jewels were taken was returned to the castle in 2007, but is now in the Garda Museum there – which, funnily enough, is in the Bermingham Tower, where it began its life before the move to Bedford Tower in 1903.

  You can also still see the house shared by Vicars and Shackleton, in St James’s Terrace, Clonskeagh.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  The loss of various reports and documents is a big problem, but really it’s virtually certain that the jewels will no longer be in the same recognizable form. They will have been split up and distributed over half of Europe before the World War I.

  On the upside, those of you who don’t like snakes should have no problem in Ireland…

  THE ARK OF THE COVENANT

  WHAT IS IT?

  Depending on whether you’re an adventure movie fan, a believer in visits to Earth by ancient astronauts, or a religious believer, your answer could vary between ‘a radio for talking to God’, some kind of Star Trek-style replicator that supplies food, or a sacred vessel for holding the literal power of God within it.

  Basically, however, it would be safest to say that it is a wooden box, covered inside and out with gold sheeting, which is supposed to contain the actual stone tablets graven with the Ten Commandments.

  The Ark was – or is – a wooden box, two cubits long, by one and a half deep, and one and a half wide. The exact size can only really be estimated as an average because the original dimensions are in cubits, and a cubit was defined as the distance from a man’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger. Since everybody is a little different, the exact dimensions would vary according to the person making the box. Nowadays, however, the cubit is usually averaged out to mean 18in, which would make the box 3ft long, 2ft 3in deep, and 2ft 3in wide.

  The wood is sandwiched between sheets of gold, inside and out. There’s a gold ring on each corner, oriented as two rings on each side. Two wooden staves, sheathed in gold, go through the gold rings for carrying the Ark.

  The lid, or ‘mercy seat’, is two and a half cubits (3ft 9in) by one and a half cubits (2ft 3in) of pure gold, and has two cherubim beaten out of a single piece of gold. These cherubim are at opposite ends of the lid, facing each other, with their wings held stretched out towards each other. There’s no mention of how thick the lid is, but it’d have to be around a quarter of an inch thick.

  The Ark isn’t supposed to be empty, of course, but should contain two stone tablets, the luchot HaBrit in Hebrew, on which the Ten Commandments are engraved.

  HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?

  Even before getting into the historical value and religious signficance … a lot. At the time of writing, gold is worth $937 per troy ounce. From the Biblical dimensions of the Ark, the lid – the ‘mercy seat’ alone, not even counting the cherubs, weighs in at
around 10,966.4 ounces – that’s $10.28 million at today’s market rate.

  Just for the lid.

  Add, say, a couple of million for each side, and the floor, and, yeah, $15 million in gold alone? Plus the additional cultural and historical value. Plus, if you believe the religious texts, the ability to talk directly to God and demolish cities.

  THE STORY

  According to the Biblical book of Exodus, when Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for 40 days to commune with God in a cloud, he was given the instructions for constructing the Ark of the Covenant, as well as given the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, which would be kept in it. He was also given instructions on creating the Tabernacle – the temple that would house the Ark when they were encamped – and all the furniture it would need, and how to properly handle it. It even had to be kept behind a curtain.

  Although Moses came back downhill with the Ten Commandments after 40 days, it took a year before the Ark was ready. The Israelites then carried it at the head of their march for 40 years between Egypt and the Promised Land. As well as providing food in the form of manna when supplies ran short, it also parted the River Jordan, so that everybody could walk across without getting their feet wet.

  When the Israelite army reached Jericho and needed to bring down the city’s walls, as well as the horns that were blown by seven priests on a circumnavigation of the walls each day, the Ark was borne around as well.

  Eventually, Joshua set it up in a permanent Tabernacle at Shiloh, but things soon went awry. The Israelites decided to take it as a weapon to the Battle of Gibeah, but still got beaten. The Ark itself – or God, whose power energized it – tended not to work for them when they tried to use it as a weapon without God’s prior instructions to do so, and this occurred both at Gibeah, and later on, when the Philistines came calling. Normally after a defeat, such as at Gibeah, or at the Battle of Ai before that, the Israelites would consult the Ark and mourn at it, but when they fought against the Philistines, things changed.