Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Ireland
Surname/tag: Blood, Bludd, Bloud

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Colonel Thomas Blood

A woodcut of Thomas Blood, circa 1671

Author: Garry Michael Blood, 24 Jul 2023

For most people of the Blood name or of Blood ancestry, one of the first things they want to know is whether they’re related to the famous (and infamous) Colonel Thomas Blood, known among many other deeds for his botched attempt to steal the Crown Jewels of England from the Tower of London in 1671. As one Blood researcher put it, “Everyone wants to be related to the colonel." So, you’re probably wondering if you are. First, the bottom-line up-front answer if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing:

• If you're an Irish Blood of County Clare or are descended from them, then you're very likely to be related.
• If you descend from Irish Bloods from other parts of Ireland, then we simply have no idea as we don't know where any of these other Irish Bloods came from, especially the earliest ones of Dublin and Cork.
• If you’re a Derbyshire Blood or descend from the Derbyshire Bloods, then you might be a distant relation.
• If your lineage is from elsewhere in England, to include Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, or Leicestershire, then you're at best an extremely distant relation, probably on the order of 20th cousins or even more distant (most North American Bloods fall into this category). At that point it's hard to characterise as related in any meaningful sense.

For those of you who want to dig deeper, in outline form this is what is known to be true or at least what is asserted to be true of Thomas Blood and his Irish Blood predecessors:

• Thomas was born either in 1618 or 1628, possibly in County Clare but more likely in County Meath, both places being in the Kingdom of Ireland. His father, usually named as Thomas as well, had established himself in Meath not later than 1622. Therefore, the later his son Thomas' birth occurred, the more likely it was in Meath. Note that other sources name his father as Thomas' brother Neptune, although this is very unlikely.
• While it appears he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Parliamentarian army in the English Civil War (after deserting from the Royalist army), he later seems to have promoted himself to the rank of colonel as a bit of self-aggrandisement.
• His father is said to have been a prosperous landowner and ironmaster or ironmonger or blacksmith (different versions of the story use different terms), who was said to have been “of English descent.”
• Colonel Thomas Blood’s grandfather (the father of both Thomas and Neptune) is usually named as Captain Edmund Blood of County Clare. While that's certain for Neptune, it's somewhat less certain for Thomas, Col Blood's father.
• Captain Edmund Blood was a member of either the gentry or the minor aristocracy (see Edmund Blood's analysis page for more on that), and this would have placed Thomas Blood (both father and son) at a higher rank in Anglo-Irish society than the average person.

New DNA Evidence: April 2023 Y-DNA test results of a direct male descendant of Edmund Blood via his son Neptune has confirmed without question that Edmund Blood of County Clare was genetically a Derbyshire Blood, matching the Irish Bloods' story that he was from the Midlands, and probably from Derbyshire. However, the DNA evidence cannot confirm from where in Derbyshire Edmund originated, or whether he physically originated in Derbyshire at all -- carrying Derbyshire Blood DNA does not require one to have been born inside the borders of Derbyshire. Even by the time of his estimated birth, outward migration had seen 16th century Derbyshire Bloods settle in some of the surrounding counties.

Books About Thomas Blood

• The Audacious Crimes of Colonel Blood, by Robert Hutchinson
• Colonel Blood: The Man Who Stole the Crown Jewels, by David C. Hanrahan
• Colonel Blood: Soldier, Robber, Trickster, A Novel, by D. Lawrence-Young
• The Romance & Adventures of the Notorious Colonel Blood, by Whittenbury Kaye
• Colonel Thomas Blood, Crown-Stealer, by Wilbur Cortez Abbott