Long ago in 1362, Muhammad VI, Sultan of the Emirate of Granada, met his death at the hands of Pedro I of Castilla and a fabulous ruby changed hands.

Now, Peter wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and only excelled at making disastrous decisions, one of which was going to war with another Peter, Pedro de Aragón. And then there was a rebellion that saw him fleeing from one corner of Christian Spain to the other.

However, he did manage to get a helping hand from Edward the Black Prince of England, who liked a good punch-and-a-pint night.

Peter owed a lot of money to people, one of whom was to Eddie, so he handed over this dove-egg sized ruby that he had obtained from Muhammad the Decidedly Dead.

As mentioned above, the Black Prince (no, we’re not talking about an 80s-onwards pop star) was never happier than when lopping off French peasants’ heads and blunting swords on somebody else’s expensive armour. After all, he was assured a stable career in this sort of things because he lived during the 100 Years War.

His death, however, wasn’t the result of a battlefield disagreement but rather from dysentery back in Blighty.

Now, in case you haven’t realised it, this story is about the ruby (or spinel, owing to its magnesium content), which was now firmly in the hands of the English royalty. Henry V had the ridiculous idea of mounting it on his helmet and rode into battle with it on his noggin until a French duke whacked him on his head with an axe, but as brain damage wasn’t a set back for medieval royalty and because this was the Battle of Agincourt, Harry survived, as did his dented helmet and red gemstone.

Then Richard III, with the same regal carelessness, wore it on his helmet at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, with the difference that Richard went for a Burton on the battlefield.

Then we get to Henry the VIII, who took more care of his jewels than he did his wives and fortunately for the jewel in question, English kings had stopped stomping around muddy fields, surrounded by annoyed Frenchmen by then.

You would think that the jewel was safe by this time but you hadn’t counted on Oliver Cromwell, who filled a stop-gap roll for the French, when it came to beating English kings around the head with sharp objects. There being no King’s head, literally, for a crown, he melted down all the royal gold for coins and flogged off the rest of Charles’s bling.

Who bought the Black Princes’s ill-gained gemstone is a mystery but we do know that Charles the Second, had already got his crafty mitts on it when he came to the throne after ‘Orrible Ollie joined Charlie One in the Great Beyond.

It was Queen Victoria, with her penchant for accruing large areas of the Earth’s surface, who had the Imperial Coronation Crown knocked up and put Prince Eddie’s jewel smack in the middle of the front of the crown, whilst adorning the rest of the Queen’s lid with bling amounting to 3,092 other gems.

And there sits Prince Edward’s Ruby to this day, and, as no Monarch between Vicky and Bess II took it off to war, it’s in pretty safe hands. Well, admittedly, we shall have to wait and see if it is in safe hands at the moment.

The question is, did that poor, bloody slave who spent his miserable existence in a mine in Afghanistan, who pulled it from the mine wall, realise what a journey it would make throughout time, whilst his destiny was never to see sunlight again…

(News/Feature: The Black Prince’s Ruby)