A jobless shop worker has pleaded guilty to plotting to kill the Queen under a charge covered by the Treason Act.

Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, from Hampshire, was arrested on Christmas Day 2021, near Windsor Castle armed with a loaded crossbow.

He had used a rope ladder the scale the perimeter and had been inside the grounds for two hours when he was aprehended.

The late monarch was living at Windsor at the time due to the Covid pandemic.

At the Old Bailey earlier, Chail, 21, pleaded guilty to three charges.

Chail is the first person in the UK to be convicted of treason in more than four decades.

Chail, from North Baddesley, near Southampton, also admitted making threats to kill and possessing the loaded weapon in the castle. He will be sentenced on 31 March.

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He was discovered by a royal protection officer in a private section of the castle grounds at around 8am on 25 December 2021.

The officer was at a gate, leading to the monarch’s private apartments.

Unemployed Chail, who had worked for the Co-op supermarket, was wearing a hood and a mask “like something out of a vigilante movie”.

The policeman his Taser stun gun and calmly asked him: “Morning, can I help, mate?” Chail replied: “I am here to kill the Queen.”

The weapon was loaded and the safety catch was off.

He carried a handwritten note which said: “Please don’t remove my clothes, shoes and gloves, masks etc, don’t want post-mortem, don’t want embalming, thank you and I’m sorry.”

In a Snapchat video recorded before entering the castle grounds, he apologised for what he was about to do and declared his actions were in revenge for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the British in which many hundreds died.

British soldiers fired on an estimated 6,000 civilians who had gathered in the city of Amritsar.