Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past. Today we’re looking at the story of the Black Prince’s Ruby,
one of the most famous royal gemstones, not just in the English crown jewels,
but in the world. It may shock you to learn however, that much of this stone’s story is
either false or unverifiable and it isn’t even a ruby. So let’s take a journey from the 14th
century to the present day to find out what we really know about this jewel in the crown.
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Calling perks and I’ve left a link to an article about the Black Prince’s Ruby by Jack Ogden
there too, as it was one of the best secondary sources I read whilst researching this video.
Nowadays the so-called Black Prince’s Ruby is the centrepiece of the 1937 British Imperial
State Crown and when not in use, it resides in the Tower of London’s Jewel House where you can
visit it along with the rest of the British Crown Jewels. It is 170 carats, 4.3cm high and about
the size of a small chicken egg. At some point in its history, a small hole was drilled into one end
of it so that it could be hung on a pendant. It is not however, despite its name, a ruby.
Instead it is a spinel, also known as a balas. Likely mined somewhere in the middle east, these
stones were often indistinguishable from rubies until 1783 when the technology to differentiate
between the two was invented. The only piece of ruby you’re looking at here, is the little
gold rimmed stone which has been used to plug the hole pieced in the main gem. Nevertheless,
as it is so frequently referred to as the Black Prince’s Ruby, I’m going to continue to call it
that for the most part, rather than be pedantic and insist on calling it a spinel the whole time.
If you look up its Wikipedia entry or many (not all) of the countless websites or books which
discuss its history you’ll be told some variation of the following story about its origins.
Once upon a time in the 1360s King Pedro I of Castile and Leon (who was a real guy,
sometimes referred to as Pedro the Cruel) took this stone from King Muhammed VI of Granada. In
1367 Pedro was facing a revolt from his brother, Enrique of Trastamara and in order to put it down,
he needed military support, which he duly got from Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, commonly
referred to as the Black Prince, even though that name was never used during his lifetime.
In exchange for this support at the Battle of Najera, he gave Prince Edward the ruby/spinel
and it has stayed in the English, later British crown jewels almost continuously ever since.
You might then also read that Henry V wore the stone in his crown during the famous Battle of
Agincourt in 1415 and that Richard III was wearing it in his crown when he was killed at the Battle
of Bosworth in 1485 and his throne taken by Henry VII. It’s a great story. If only there was ANY
primary source evidence whatsoever to back it up, but there’s not. Even the Wikipedia entry comes
close to admitting that this is all fantasy, by the almost total lack of footnotes in the relevant
section and the notice across the top saying that further sources are needed for verification.
The one source it does cite, which I went and looked up, is this one; a book from 1930 which
repeats a lot of what I’ve just told you, but doesn’t provide any evidence to support it.
This whole case therefore serves as an excellent example of the dangers
of trusting Wikipedia and badly referenced sources in general,
as well as the many pseudo-history channels out there run by people pretending to be historians,
but who don’t actually do any proper research and end up just regurgitating
trash like this. No trained historian would employ sources like these to support their arguments,
so please beware of anyone you see using them as though they’re reputable and reliable.
The best lies do incorporate as much truth as possible though and that is perhaps why
this origin story has gained so much traction, because some of the details in it are true. The
historical figures are all real and contemporary 14th century chronicles, including one by a man
named Pedro López de Ayala, confirm that Pedro did take many jewels from Muhammed,
including large ballas stones. Furthermore, Henry V and Richard III did indeed wear crowns at the
Battles of Agincourt and Bosworth respectively as contemporary accounts confirm and Richard’s
was indeed taken up after his death and placed on the new Henry VII’s head on the battlefield,
as you see in this later illustration. There’s nothing in the sources to suggest that Muhammed,
later Pedro’s jewels included what is now known as the Black Prince’s Ruby however, nor that Henry
and Richard’s crowns contained a giant red spinel, let alone the same one we can see in
the Tower of London today. That said, there were certainly large balas stones in the royal coffers
during the medieval and early modern periods and it’s easy to see why some have tried to
project the history of the Black Prince’s Ruby backwards to tie it in with one of these gems.
One of the most intriguing for instance is a 181 carat ballas listed as being in a crown
which formed part of the ‘Spanish Jewels’ in the possession of Edward III of England in the 1370s.
King Edward was the father of the Black Prince so there’s always a chance this stone came to him via
his son and its size puts it in the ball park of the current ruby (which is 170 carats remember,
but converting from old measurements to new is tricky and that could account for a discrepancy).
Nevertheless, while I can’t 100% promise you that the Black Prince’s Ruby hasn’t been floating
around the English royal treasuries since the 1300s, no one else can promise you that it has.
Nor can we absolutely link it to the jewels we know the Tudors and early Stuarts owned.
The inventories we have for the likes of Henry VIII and (a century later) James I,
do include lots of references to ballases and at least one which was set into a crown held at the
Tower of London in 1604 was actually described as being pierced, but without drawings of the
stones there’s just no way to know for sure if one of them was the Black Prince’s Ruby.
Speaking of imagery we do having paintings of royal crowns and gemstones prior to the
mid-17th century (I’ll explain why that’s an important cut-off point in a few minutes),
but we don’t see the Black Prince’s Ruby in any of them. Richard II’s crown doesn’t have any
stones for instance. The lost Tudor state crown (which I have a whole video on that I’ll leave
linked for you) has nothing with the distinctly uneven shape of the Black Prince’s Ruby and nor
does Elizabeth I in her coronation portrait. This is despite the fact that both of the Tudor crowns
shown in these pictures as well as Elizabeth’s cloak are covered in lots of rubies or spinels
(and before anyone asks, I don’t think that teardrop shaped ruby on the lower part of
the cross on the top of Elizabeth’s crown is our stone as it’s just not the correct shape).
What these portraits do hammer home though, just as the inventories do,
is the sheer number of red gemstones in the Tudors’ possession, emphasising how
dangerous it is to go assuming that any large ruby or spinel mentioned in their coffers is
the Black Prince’s Ruby. Any such references could relate to literally scores of stones, maybe more.
In 1649 the monarchy was overthrown entirely when the Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell took
power in Britain and executed Charles I. The crown jewels were then broken up and sold off
and amongst the records of those disposed of is this intriguing note: ‘One Ruby Ballass, peirced,
and wrapt in a paper by it selfe valued at 004li 00s 00d. Sold to Demaresque 21 Jan. 1649/50
[that means 1650 in our modern calendar] for £4.10s.’ Might this be the Black Prince’s Ruby?
Again, with no image or better description of it it’s impossible to be sure and it’s
only later in the 17th century, after the monarchy had been restored (which occurred
in 1660 when Charles II took the throne) that we come to firmer ground regarding this stone.
In 1687 Francis Sandford published a book about the coronation of James II,
who had come to the throne after the death of his older brother, Charles II, in 1685. Within this
book he described the Crown of State created after the Restoration and provided this picture of it.
His description (which I’ve shortened to highlight the bits that are important to us) says:
This was also new made against the Coronation of His late Majesty KING
Charles the Second, and was worn by the King in his Return to Westminster-Hall…it
is most remarkable for a Wonderful large Ruby,
set in the midle [sic] of one of the four Crosses, esteemed worth Ten Thousand Pounds.
The image of the crown and the fact that the so-called ruby in the front of it was thought
to be so extraordinary certainly point towards this being the Black Prince’s Ruby and if I was
a betting person, I would be prepared to put down some money on it, however it’s not a sure thing.
The large stone in the front of this crown is not quite the correct shape, nor do we see the
tell-tale piercing on it, but perhaps the artist just wasn’t good enough to capture these details
or was working from descriptions of the crown, rather than first hand, close-up experience of
seeing it. Look at this early 20th century image of the stone for instance and you can
see that its shape has been regularised somewhat so that it appears more oval than it really is.
As for the date the ruby was put into it, although this crown was created for Charles II,
we still cannot be certain that the ruby wasn’t a later addition and the best we can say is that it
was in the front of this crown by 1687. The first definite look we get at the Black Prince’s Ruby
actually doesn’t come until a coloured image of it in George I’s crown was produced in 1718 and
even it doesn’t have the piercing. This is that image (in the centre) and when you place it next
to the 1687 image and a 20th century picture of the crown you can see that by George I’s time,
the ruby/spinel was definitely in the royal jewels collection, as its shape, when represented
properly, is unique and immediately identifiable. The 1718 drawing also gives us some further
information about the stone’s history which only adds to the theory that it wasn’t in Charles II’s
crown, for beneath the picture are the words ‘ye Balass in ye Cross in front was given to ye Crown
by King James II’. James ruled between 1685 and 1688 (if you’d like to know more about the fairly
bizarre way in which he lost the throne, see my video on that) so if this statement is true, then
we have a few ways to interpret it. One is that the jewel, despite everything I’ve said so far,
was only brought into the royal family during James’s lifetime. Another is that it was already
part of the crown jewels and he was merely the first person to have it set into the state crown.
As an extension of this idea, we can still argue that it had been in the jewel collection for
potentially hundreds of years and was either bought back into it after the Restoration,
or had been taken into exile in France by the Stuarts at the time of the English Civil Wars
and never actually left their possession. If it was only set into the crown after Sandford
drew it in 1687 though, that would explain why his picture doesn’t show a stone with
quite the same shape as the Black Prince’s Ruby. Incidentally, if it was in the Imperial State
Crown during Charles II’s time, then that would mean that it was also nearly stolen in 1671 when
Colonel Thomas Blood and his accomplices tried to nick the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.
If you see my video on St Edward’s Crown, I go over that story in more detail there.
So why, given how many rubies and spinels the royals have owned over the years and the fact
that there isn’t definitive proof of the ruby’s presence in the royal collection
until the late 17th century, has such a fantastical story been attached to it?
Well one reason is because of a now discredited theory put forward in the 18th century by writer
and politician Horace Walpole involving this picture, which he thought was Prince Edward.
Writing in 1765 he said that there was ‘great reason’ to think this image was contemporary with
the Prince’s life and that it ‘represents him in black armour, embossed with gold,
and with a golden lion on his breast. He has a hat with a white feather, and a large ruby,
exactly in the shape of the rough ruby still in the crown…This very curious picture came out of
Betchworthcastle in Surrey.’ There are various problems with this theory. Walpole offers no
explanation as to why this painting must be a 14th century image and as the original is long since
lost (all we have is this print of it), we can’t run any analysis on it to check. Also, no matter
what Walpole said the stone shown here (though it must have been red coloured in the original
painting for him to refer to it as a ruby) does not otherwise look particularly like the spinel
in the current Imperial crown and there’s also no reason to think that this man is the Black Prince.
Even his description of the clothing the sitter is wearing is flat out wrong,
something which was picked up on fairly quickly, for as Richard Gough wrote in 1786:
the lion rampart, as here, is neither the Black Prince’s coat nor crest. What
Mr. Walpole calls armour, the engraver represents as a surcoat with a plated
gorget [that’s the piece of clothing over the throat] and mail sleeves;
the ruby still in the crown would hardly have ever been in the Prince of Wales’s bonet.
In 1826 another writer, James Dalloway, responded to Walpole’s comments by saying:
The claim of this, as a genuine portrait of the Black Prince, is at least apocryphal. I
cannot but consider it as of a much later age, and painted even since the succeeding century.
He also calls this engraving which we have of it ‘poor’.
So my friends, there you have it. There’s no solid evidence to connect the so-called Black
Prince’s Ruby to the Black Prince and the first person to do so made
the leap on the basis of a very dodgy identification of a now lost painting.
The stone itself cannot be traced back with any certainty beyond the reign of James II,
though there is anecdotal evidence that it was in the royal jewels collection earlier than that.
Thankfully once we get to the 18th century, the gem’s history from that point on is much easier
to follow. Here is the empty frame from George I’s state crown (the one depicted in the 1718 drawing)
in which we can see the unusual shape of the gold mount in the front which would only fit the
Black Prince’s Ruby. From there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the modern-day Imperial crown.
The Crown has been remade several times over the past few centuries, but always the Black Prince’s
Ruby has been a part of it and they usually pops up at coronations and at state openings of
parliament. After coasting through the Georgian era and the reign of William IV (who was on the
throne from 1821 until 1837), the crown with the Black Prince’s Ruby was inherited by the
very petite Queen Victoria, who had a fresh Imperial State Crown made up in time for her
1838 coronation which would be easier for this diminutive monarch to wear (unfortunately the
Duke of Argyll dropped it during the ceremony and damaged it, but it was repaired). Later in life,
after her husband Albert died she felt its coloured stones (and the Black Prince’s Ruby must
have been one of the main offenders here) were inappropriate for mourning and refused to don it,
instead having it carried on a cushion to state events where its presence was required.
The ruby was worn in that same crown at the coronation of her son, Edward VII, in 1902,
then both passed to his son, George V, in 1910 and were worn at his 1911 coronation.
However when his son George VI unexpectedly came to the throne after the abdication crisis of 1936,
once again a new Imperial State Crown was made up (in 1937) to replace the now quite aged
Victorian version and the Black Prince’s Ruby was transferred again. This is the crown his daughter
Elizabeth II wore (after it had been reduced in size slightly to better fit her) at the time of
her coronation in 1953 and it is the one still in existence today and which sat on her coffin in
2022. It is one of the crowns expected to be used at all future coronations, possibly with further
adjustments to suit the head size and tastes of future wearers, but whether this happens or not we
can expect the Black Prince’s ruby to retain its prominent position in this famous piece of royal
headgear. From slightly murky beginnings, its place in history now seems assured.
That brings us to the end of another trek through the past. Thank you to my Patrons for their
support and to those who you who donate using the Thanks button underneath videos. Your generosity
helps to make such videos possible. For more on the crown jewels and coronations, try one of these
videos next and let me know in the comments when you think the stone landed in the English crown
jewels collection. Do you think it was a medieval acquisition, or do you lean more towards the 17th
century? I’ll be back next time with something new for you and until then, keep learning.