What Happened to the Tudor Crown?

From History Calling

The TUDOR CROWN is one of the most famous royal jewels lost to history. Having been created for either Henry VII or Henry VIII, it was described in minute detail in an inventory of 1521 and pictured over a century later in numerous portraits of Charles I and his family, but when Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians got their hands on it in the late 1640s, it, along with most of the rest of the English Crown Jewels was melted down so that its gold could be used for coinage and its precious stones were sold off. After all, they thought, the purpose of crown jewels was to show off the wealth and power of the monarchy and the Cromwellians had toppled and executed the King. A completely new suite of jewels had to be created at the time of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but Henry VIII’s crown (as he’s the first person we know for sure wore it) was gone. In this royal jewels documentary from History Calling, we look at the paper trail and the pictorial evidence to establish what this famous crown looked like, what Henry VIII wore it for, how it was altered after the Reformation and just how sumptuous it was. We’ll also look at its appearance (in simplified form) in numerous royal monograms, or cyphers, over the last 400 years (including in the monogram of Charles III) and at how it can still be seen on telephone boxes, post boxes and royal and governmental correspondence to this day. Finally we’ll consider the theory that one small piece of this crown was rediscovered by accident in a field in 2021.