The Crown Jewels: What Actually Sits in the Tower of London

The British Crown Jewels are not one treasure but roughly 140 of them — a working set of ceremonial objects, from crowns and sceptres to orbs, swords and robes, kept under armed guard in the Jewel House at the Tower of London. Between them they carry more than 23,000 gemstones, and unlike almost every other royal collection on Earth, they are still in use: the monarch was crowned with them in 2023 and wears part of the set at each State Opening of Parliament. Around 2.5 million people file past the display cases every year, which makes this arguably the most-viewed jewellery collection in the world. Here is what they are actually looking at — including one famous stone that is not what its name claims.

What the collection actually is

Strictly speaking, the Crown Jewels are the coronation regalia: the objects placed on or handed to a new sovereign during the coronation service at Westminster Abbey. They are held in trust by the monarch for the nation — not personal property to be sold or bequeathed — and they have lived at the Tower of London since the 1660s.

Most of the collection is younger than people expect. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth government ordered the medieval regalia broken up: the gold was melted into coin and the stones sold off. Centuries of Saxon and medieval treasure vanished in a stroke. When the monarchy was restored, Charles II commissioned a complete new set for his coronation in 1661, modelled on records of what had been lost — reportedly at a cost of over £12,000, described by one account as roughly the price of building three warships. That is why the oldest piece still used in coronations, the humble silver-gilt Coronation Spoon, dates from the twelfth century while nearly everything around it dates from 1661 onwards.

St Edward's Crown: the crown of the moment itself

If you had to pick a single object as the crown, this is it. St Edward's Crown, made in 1661, is the crown placed on the sovereign's head at the actual moment of coronation — and at no other time. It is 22-carat gold, set with 444 stones, and weighs about 2.23 kilograms, which is nearly five pounds resting on one human neck. That weight is a large part of why it appears so rarely: Charles III wore it for the crowning itself in May 2023, then swapped it for something lighter before leaving Westminster Abbey, exactly as his mother did in 1953.

Its name honours Edward the Confessor, the Saxon king whose original crown was among the treasures destroyed in 1649. The 1661 replacement was built to carry that memory forward, which tells you something about how the collection works: the objects are not merely valuable, they are arguments for continuity, made in gold.

The Imperial State Crown: four famous stones on one frame

The crown most people picture — the one worn while leaving the coronation and at the State Opening of Parliament — is the Imperial State Crown. Its current frame was made in 1937 for George VI, and it carries close to 3,200 stones — 2,868 of them diamonds — including some of the most storied gems in existence.

At the front sits Cullinan II, a cushion-shaped diamond of about 317 carats cut from the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found. In the cross at the very top is St Edward's Sapphire, which legend — and we should be clear it is legend — says was worn in a ring by Edward the Confessor and later recovered from his tomb. At the back is the Stuart Sapphire, a deep blue oval of roughly 104 carats that followed the exiled Stuart dynasty around Europe before finding its way home.

And then there is the Black Prince's Ruby — which, in plain honesty, is not a ruby at all. It is a large red spinel, a different mineral entirely, weighing about 170 carats. The confusion is forgivable: for centuries, fine red spinels and rubies were indistinguishable to jewellers, and many celebrated "rubies" in royal collections turned out to be spinels once gemmology caught up. Tradition holds that Pedro of Castile gave the stone to Edward the Black Prince in 1367, and that Henry V wore it on his helmet at Agincourt in 1415. Misnamed or not, it has one of the longest documented histories of any gem in the collection — and we rather admire that the Tower labels it truthfully. A stone does not need a borrowed name to be extraordinary.

The sceptre carrying the largest cut diamond on Earth

The single most valuable stone in the collection is not in a crown at all. The Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross — a gold rod placed in the monarch's right hand during the coronation — holds Cullinan I, also called the Great Star of Africa: a pear-shaped diamond of 530.2 carats, still the largest colourless cut diamond in the world. It was cut from the 3,106-carat Cullinan rough, discovered in South Africa in 1905, and mounted in the sceptre in 1910. The full story of that stone — and of the Koh-i-Noor, which sits in a separate crown in the same room — deserves its own telling, and we have given it one in our guide to the most famous diamonds in history.

The key pieces at a glance

The day Colonel Blood nearly got away with it

The jewels have been stolen exactly once — briefly. In 1671 an Irish adventurer called Colonel Thomas Blood spent weeks visiting the Tower disguised as a parson, patiently befriending Talbot Edwards, the elderly assistant keeper who supplemented his income by showing the regalia to visitors. Blood even proposed a marriage between his (invented) nephew and Edwards' daughter. On 9 May 1671 he returned with three accomplices, asked for a private viewing, and attacked the old man the moment the door closed. Blood flattened St Edward's Crown with a mallet to hide it under his cloak; another man stuffed the orb down his breeches; the sceptre was to be filed in half.

They were caught before they cleared the Tower — Edwards' son arrived home at precisely the wrong moment for them — and here the story turns strange. Blood refused to answer to anyone but the king, and Charles II not only granted the audience but pardoned him outright, even awarding him Irish lands said to be worth £500 a year. Why remains one of English history's small, delicious mysteries. Theories range from royal amusement to Blood knowing something inconvenient. No one knows.

Why the jewels are never insured — and almost never leave

Ask what the Crown Jewels are worth and the official answer is that there is no answer. The collection has never been insured and carries no formal valuation, because valuation implies the possibility of sale, and these objects will never be sold. Commentators have floated figures in the billions of pounds, but honestly, the number is unknowable: what is the market price of the only 530-carat diamond on Earth, attached to four centuries of coronations? It is the same reason the great historic record-setting rings are so hard to rank — past a certain point, history outweighs carats. The regalia leave the Tower only for state occasions such as coronations and the State Opening of Parliament, and they do not leave the country at all.

We spend our days at the opposite end of the jewellery world from all this — no armed guards, no legends, just lab-grown diamonds we can document honestly and rings made to order in our Surat workshop. But the Black Prince's Ruby is quietly our favourite object in the Jewel House, because it makes a point we believe in: call a stone what it actually is, and it loses nothing. Every diamond we set is IGI-certified with its report number laser-inscribed on the girdle — a small, modern way of keeping the label honest. If that appeals, our engagement rings are a gentler place to start than the Tower.