Sacre Bleu! Those thieving Frenchies want to steal our Crown Jewels!

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 12:37 GMT, 16 July 2012 | Updated: 18:23 GMT, 16 July 2012

What, exactly, is up with the French?

First they try to strangle the City of London with EU taxes to eliminate it as the world's financial capital.

Then they elect as their President Francois Hollande, a diminutive henpecked Gallic cockerel torn in his private life between two warring Socialist females, who vows to square a circle by spending money that he doesn't have, while simultaneously cutting costs and France's ballooning debts. (Good luck with that one, Francois!).

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Petition: The French city of Angers is demanding the British Crown jewels

Next, they plan to help raise the necessary cash by taxing British second home owners in France out of those same homes.

Finally, today, comes the extraordinary news that they are demanding Britain's Crown Jewels. When I first read this, I thought that the French had lifted the plot of Rowan Atkinson's 2003 absurd spy spoof film 'Johnny English' in which a demented Frenchman, Pascal Sauvage (played by John Malkovich) plans to emulate jewel thief Colonel Blood and steal the jewels from the Tower of London in a dramatic heist.

But no, apparently this demand is for real. The historic French city of Angers, capital of the ancient French province of Anjou on the beautiful River Loire, plans to present a petition to our Queen demanding that she gives Angers the jewels  as 'compensation' for the execution of  the last of England's Angevin dynasty who originally hailed from Anjou.

Bloody history: The Crown Jewels are being claimed as 'compensation' for England's murder of the last of the Angevin dynasty

As I explain in my book 'Tower: an epic history of the Tower of London'  Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick (not to be confused with the more famous 'Warwick the Kingmaker') was a tragic youth who was executed - in fact judicially murdered - in 1499 after languishing in the Tower for fourteen weary years. (He was a child of ten when he was first banged up). Poor Edward's only crime was his Royal blood.

His father, George, Duke of Clarence, was infamously also murdered in the Tower by being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine, and many members of his Yorkist dynasty were also eliminated when the ruthless Henry VII, first of the Tudor monarchs, seized the throne in 1485, determined to end the ruinous Wars of the Roses which had devastated the kingdom for thirty blood soaked years.

Accused of plotting to take the throne, young Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill as Henry brutally cleansed the slate of potential rivals. In fact, the poor earl was almost certainly mentally retarded - a condition surely exacerbated by his cruel confinement - and, according to an observer at his trial, 'Could not tell a goose from a capon'.

Distraction: France is in for a bumpy ride under Socialist Francois Hollande

Now Angers, admittedly rather late in the day, is jumping on the fashionable bandwagon of restorative justice  and asking for the priceless Crown Jewels - which ironically are housed in the same Tower of London where Warwick suffered for so long - to be given to the city to make up for his murder. A petition on the city's official website which has already gathered hundreds of signatures, points out that the Angevins gave 14 kings, and at least one Queen - the Feisty Margaret of Anjou -  to England from Henry II,  the first Plantagenet sovereign in 1154, down to Richard III, slain by Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.  The Angevin  kings Henry II and his son Richard the Lionheart  are buried on the Loire.

Warwick, the last of the line, - like the two 'Princes in the Tower' whom Richard almost certainly had murdered in the grim fortress in 1483 -  was Richard's nephew, and was named as his successor after his own son died of natural causes.

Although the petition  - which will be sent to Her Majesty in due course - is surely  a piece of tongue in  cheek tweaking of the British lion's tail, and no-one seriously supposes that the Jewels will be packed up and shipped across the Channel, it is psychologically interesting.  Why are the French - who beheaded their own King and Queen after the French Revolution of 1789, and exiled two subsequent monarchs and a brace of Bonapartist Emperors too - so obsessed with monarchy?

I had the good fortune, this weekend, to listen to three distinguished experts on France - the TV presenter Jonathan Meades; the journalist and historian Jonathan Fenby; and the doctor and social critic Theodore Dalrymple, who all have French wives and live in France - give their opinions at the Lewes Speakers Festival in Sussex on the future of France under President Hollande.

It was the opinion of all three pundits that our French cousins are in for a bumpy ride. In plumping for a tax and spend  Socialist, they thought, our French friends have chosen to float off on one of their regular voyages into dreamland where monery grows on trees like walnuts, and where, if it doesn't, the Germans will always pick up the tab.

If that is really their mindset, they are in for a rude awakening. Frau Angela Merkel is as likely to play the Fairy Godmother granting Gallic fantasies as the Queen is to  give Angers her Jewels. Meanwhile, they can dream on.

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