Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  A hesitant Duleep wrote almost apologetic letters to the palace and his former guardians, the Logins, explaining his mother’s wishes, and sheepishly saying that he might as well go along with the idea. He was perhaps rather taken aback when the British told the rebel queen that she would be able to sail to England. Though they still treated her with a mixture of suspicion and derision, having Jindan on British soil served their purpose: in one fell swoop they could remove her from India, and any chance of her stirring insurrection there, and keep her under close watch. If the British needed a reminder of how potent Jindan was in the eyes of fellow Punjabis, they got it at the reunion itself.

  A troopship filled with Sikh soldiers returning from the second Opium War happened to be sailing up Calcutta’s Hooghly River. Rumours spread among the crew that their lost maharaja had returned to India, and that Rani Jindan, his much-wronged mother, was back at his side. In no time at all, hundreds of exhausted and emotional soldiers gathered around Spence’s Hotel. Their bellowing salute to their fallen sovereigns shook the walls: ‘Jo Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal!’ – ‘Whoever says these words will know true joy. Eternal is the Lord God!’

  After that, the British could not get the pair on a boat fast enough.

  From the moment of her return, Jindan filled her son’s ears with tales of his ‘stolen’ Koh-i-Noor. Under the rani’s influence, Duleep slowly changed, turning from a favourite pet of the royal court into a man who dared to defy its wishes. The more Duleep’s friends gossiped about his mother, the closer he seemed to draw to her. Lady Normanby counted herself as an ally and confidante of the maharaja. She regularly leased her ancestral home, Mulgrave Castle, to Duleep whenever he wished to hunt. The rugged 16,000-acre estate in Yorkshire allowed him to indulge his passions for shooting and for throwing lavish parties. When Duleep chose to bring his mother with him to Mulgrave, Lady Normanby poured scorn on Jindan behind his back. Writing to her own son, she gossiped: ‘She … sometimes dresses in a dirty sheet and a pair of cotton stockings, sometimes decked out in a Cloth of Gold and covered with jewels … It rather seems to me when I see queer Indian figures flitting about that “The Heathen are come in to mine inheritance.”’5

  Duleep, who must have been aware of the whispering, refused to be swayed by it. Instead, he chose to purchase a house for his mother in an exclusive part of London, opposite Hyde Park, at 1 Lancaster Gate. Duleep himself lived just around the corner, in a smart residence at Number 3. Passers-by often pressed their noses to the windows of the mysterious rani’s house, drawn by the exotic smell of spiced dishes bubbling in the kitchen vats.

  Not long after their return to London, the maharaja began to question the terms of the settlement he had been forced to sign, all those years ago. These were awkward missives, which caused consternation at the highest levels. Sir John Login, formerly Duleep’s ‘Ma-Baap’, received one such letter from Duleep: ‘I very much wish to have a conversation with you about my private property in the Punjab and the Koh-i-noor diamond.’6 Realising the delicacy of the situation, Login immediately referred the letter to Buckingham Palace.

  By now, Victoria was too deep in mourning for her dead husband to show much interest, so it was left to her adviser, the keeper of the privy purse, Sir Charles Phipps, to address the situation. Phipps wrote back to Login, echoing his concern: ‘I am very sorry to hear what you say about the Maharajah – nothing could be so destructive to him as that he should succumb to his mother’s, or any other native influence. He is too good to be so lost …’7 Phipps urged Login to break Jindan’s spell over her son by becoming more involved in the maharaja’s life. Duleep had once trusted him above all others; he would do so again. In the meantime Phipps assured Login that plans were being drawn up to have the maharaja married off. If Duleep had a wife and family of his own to occupy him, Jindan’s influence would diminish. The India Office went as far as to identify a country estate far away from London that might be perfect for the maharaja and his new life.

  Behind the scenes, there was also talk of sending Jindan back to Asia, perhaps even locking her up again. But on 1 August 1863, before the British could put any such plans into action, Rani Jindan died peacefully at her home in London. She was only forty-six. She looked much older.

  If the British thought their problems had ended with the death of Duleep’s mother, they were mistaken. Jindan had successfully sown seeds of doubt in her son’s mind, and it was only after she died that they truly began to flourish. Outwardly, it seemed as if Duleep was still following the wishes of the palace, but everything now seemed a little subverted. On 7 June 1864, Duleep dutifully took a wife and started a family, much to the satisfaction of the India Office and men like Phipps. His choice, though, was bizarre to say the least: Bamba Müller was a beautiful sixteen-year-old, little educated, illegitimate daughter of a German merchant and an Abyssinian slave. She had lived in the cloistered environment of a Christian mission in Cairo from the moment she was born, and spoke not one word of English. Duleep had rejected Queen Victoria’s suggested match, of a fellow deposed Indian royal who, like him, had embraced Christianity: Princess Gowramma of Coorg. Instead, he took pains to find a person who would least fit in with court life. He was beginning to feel like an outsider, and wanted a woman who would understand that and even share his sense of alienation. Without Victoria’s knowledge, Duleep had contacted a Christian mission in Cairo, one he had visited when his ship had stopped to take on supplies during his first voyage to England. He asked the missionaries there to find him a virginal girl, a good Christian who might be moulded by him. They immediately thought of Bamba. She had grown up behind the high walls of the mission and knew nothing of the world, let alone the rarefied circles in which her future husband moved.

  Duleep also purchased the home identified for him by the India Office when Login had warned them of Jindan’s hold on him. It was a handsome estate on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, not far from the Sandringham home of his close friend the Prince of Wales. Duleep spent the next five years, and a considerable fortune, tearing down the existing mansion and rebuilding it in such a flamboyant style that locals referred to it as ‘the Wedding Cake’. Inside, the house, Elveden Hall, resembled a Mughal palace, replete with carved marble, gilt and fine silk rugs. Outwardly, he had never been more settled in his life. Inwardly, he would never again be the contented, carefree young man who had laughed and played in the bosom of Queen Victoria’s family.

  Soon after his marriage, Duleep, who had always been a bon vivant, took to drinking heavily, and carousing with even more dancing girls and women of ill repute than he had in his bachelor days. His antics caused acute embarrassment both to his new wife, who seemed permanently pregnant, producing six children in the first ten years of her marriage, and to Queen Victoria. Even when he asked Victoria to become godmother to Sophia, the youngest of his children borne by the maharani, instead of following convention and naming her Victoria he allowed her to be named after her slave grandmother Sofia, albeit with a different spelling. He was being subversive even when he appeared most loyal.

  Queen Victoria had tolerated reports of his shocking behaviour for over a decade. It had been the subject of concern from the moment she had come out of her mourning for Albert. Duleep was throwing money around in a calamitous fashion, drunkenly handing out jewels to dancing girls at the seedy Alhambra, a music hall in London’s West End, as if they were sweets. His profligate spending grated on the India Office. They kept receiving outrageous bills, which were resented. In some cases they simply refused to settle them as an expression of their disgust. Simultaneously, Elveden was haemorrhaging funds, as Duleep ploughed a fortune into the barren landscape, attempting to turn it into the best hunting estate in all England. The maharaja was living as if he still possessed Punjab. Victoria gently chided him for his excesses and asked him to temper both his conduct and his expenditure. For the first time in their warm relationship, he ignored her.

  By 1877 things had deteriorated to such an exte
nt that the British government stopped bankrolling the maharaja. Returning his invoices unpaid, its representatives presented him with a stark choice – either he changed his ways, or he faced bankruptcy and ruin. Duleep responded by going on a spending spree, challenging the India Office to return almost half a million pounds’ worth of family jewels, which he now insisted had never been subject to the treaty he had been forced to sign. He also threw in a demand for over a million pounds’ worth of ancestral lands.

  The stakes kept ratcheting higher. The India Office refused to settle a bill for Duleep Singh’s children’s clothes. Undeterred, Duleep directed a lengthening line of creditors to their door. Though he appeared bullish and belligerent, the stress of conflict was taking its toll. The once beautiful young man who had sent the painter Winterhalter into raptures was now a bad-tempered, paunchy, balding drunk. He neglected his young family at Elveden, and drove his wife to the bottle too. Though his eldest sons were at boarding school and protected from the mounting chaos, the younger children were left to run wild as Elveden disintegrated around them.

  In the early months of 1880, the British government offered Duleep a one-off, interest-free sum of £57,000, enough to pay his debts and save him from bankruptcy. But the loan came with a condition. Elveden would have to be sold upon his death and all proceeds paid back to the British government. The maharaja was devastated. The terms would render him unable to leave any inheritance to his children. They would, in effect, be homeless and at the mercy of the same state he now believed had robbed him. With creditors refusing to provide further goods and services till they were paid, and banks refusing to lend him any more money, Duleep had only one roll of the dice left. He wrote directly to Queen Victoria and pleaded with her to let him keep Elveden. He wrote:

  It breaks my heart to think my eldest son will have to be turned out of his house and home and leave the place with which his earliest associations in life are connected. No one knows but myself, my Sovereign, the agony that I suffered when I was turned out of my home and exiled from the land of my birth and I shudder to think of the sufferings the poor boy may undergo.8

  Queen Victoria’s reply was warm, but offered little solace:

  Dear Maharajah,

  I have to acknowledge your letter of the 13th which has pained me so much. You know how fond I have always been of you, and how truly I felt for you, knowing how completely innocent you were of the unfortunate circumstances which led to you leaving your own country. I have at once written to Lord Hartington [the secretary of state for India] to see what can be done to ensure your own comfort and a proper position for your children. As I once or twice mentioned to you before, I think you were thought extravagant and that may have led to a want of confidence as regards the future … Trusting that the Maharanee and your dear children are well …9

  The Duleep Singhs were far from well, and things were about to get much worse for them all.

  The maharaja turned to his influential friends for support, but most of them abandoned him, embarrassed by what he had become. He then threatened to go to the courts, but gave up on legal process when a book he wrote highlighting his legal argument against the Treaty of Lahore was ridiculed by those whose opinion carried the most weight. Duleep then turned to the press, begging the British people directly through their pages to put pressure on their government. Though the newspapers published his letters, they simultaneously mocked him for his increasing desperation.

  All the while, Victoria, the woman he had once loved like a mother, watched silently, unable or unwilling to wade in on his behalf. Hurt and angry, Duleep wrote to the queen, reminding her of what had brought him to this dire point:

  From childhood I have been absolutely in the hands of the government without a will or independent action of my own – trusting implicitly to their good faith. Now there appears to have been a deliberate intention from the first, merely to do what least might suffice to answer my urgent demands and leave my children and family to gradually sink in the world.10

  With no help forthcoming, Duleep decided to hit Victoria where he knew it would hurt her the most. He suggested he might renounce the Christianity she had so prized in him:

  My Sovereign … I embraced Christianity because those by whom I was surrounded at the time happened to be so consistent in their conduct. We Sikhs though savages by nature implicitly act up to the (such as it is) morality of our faith. We do not profess one thing and do the other.11

  To her courtiers he made even more dire threats. If the British government continued to thwart him, he might try and forge an alliance with Britain’s old enemy, Russia, and go to war, with an army of avenging Sikhs behind him.

  In January 1886, the maharaja put the entire contents of Elveden Hall up for auction. Though the bricks and mortar had been seized by the government in lieu of his debts, everything from the fixtures in the house to the few remaining pheasant eggs in the hatchery was priced up and catalogued for a quick sale. Duleep had spent five fruitless years trying to extract the funds he thought he deserved, a fraction of what had been taken from him when he was a boy. The money raised from the sale at Elveden would buy tickets for him and his family to return to India. Secretly he harboured dreams of taking his old kingdom by force. By Duleep’s calculations, his loyal subjects would rise up on his return, and Russian troops, anxious to help him, would pour in from Afghanistan.

  Duleep never made it beyond Aden. He and his family were arrested on 21 April 1886 at Port Said, before their ship could reach the Suez Canal. Though he would eventually be released, his obsession had consumed him, wrecked his family and broken his health.

  On 21 October 1893 Duleep Singh died penniless and alone in a shabby Parisian hotel. He was fifty-three. Since none of his children would ever have heirs of their own, his very name died with him. It is a tragedy still keenly felt in Punjab today.

  13

  ‘We Must Take Back the Koh-i-Noor’

  When news of Duleep’s demise became public, talk of the curse of the Koh-i-Noor was revived; and when Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Koh-i-Noor passed not to her son, the new emperor of India, King Edward VII, but to her daughter-in-law, Queen Alexandra. Somehow a belief had taken root that women could wear it with impunity but that it would destroy any man who dared. Though nobody seemed to know the provenance of the superstition, in view of what had happened to Duleep Singh, it was felt unwise to court the possibility.

  Beautiful, with snow-white complexion, deep chestnut curls and an elegant swan neck, Queen Alexandra had a passion for jewels unsurpassed in British consorts past or present. For her coronation on 9 August 1902, Queen Alexandra’s skirts were pinned with diamond bows, each with a large gem suspended from it. A diamond-encrusted girdle wound about her slender waist, and her jewelled bodice was obscured by the fabulous Dagmar necklace, comprising 2,000 diamonds and 118 pearls set in gold. The Dagmar was also said to contain a splinter of wood from the cross of Jesus Christ. Around her neck, Queen Alexandra wore a large diamond cockade1 that fought for attention among several strings of ostentatious pearls. The queen consort’s neck also somehow managed to support the weight of Queen Victoria’s coronation necklace, a spectacular piece boasting twenty-six giant diamonds.

  The item which attracted the most attention, however, was Queen Alexandra’s newly designed consort’s crown. Refashioned from the crown Queen Victoria had worn at Versailles in 1855, its 3,000 diamonds had been configured into eight sweeping arches meeting high in a diamond-encrusted globe. At the front and centre of the Coronation Crown, once again, the Koh-i-Noor took pride of place.

  In the decades that followed, the Koh-i-Noor diamond found itself at the coronation of two other British queen consorts. The wife of the future King George V, Princess Mary, found her mother-in-law’s crown too ostentatious and asked Garrard to fashion a simpler crown for her coronation in 1911. Sporting 2,200 small diamond embellishments, the crown was made so that, after her investiture, Queen Mary could remove parts and wear the r
est as a circlet. One facet remained constant. Like Queen Alexandra, and Queen Victoria before her, Queen Mary opted to keep the Koh-i-Noor at the very centre of her crown. When King George V promised to ‘Govern the People of this Kingdom of England and the Dominions thereto belonging according to the Statutes in Parliament Agreed on and the Laws and Customs of the same …’2 he did so under the gaze of the Koh-i-Noor.

  So did his son, King George VI. Never born to be king, George stepped into the void left by his love-struck brother Edward, who had abdicated to pursue his relationship with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. For George VI’s coronation, Elizabeth, his queen, had the consort’s crown refashioned again. The new crown was framed in platinum with 2,800 diamonds, mainly cushion-shaped with some rose-cut and some brilliant-cut. A band of glittering crosses and rectangles was interrupted at the front by a large diamond, given to Queen Victoria in 1856 by the sultan of Turkey. Above this, four fleurs-de-lis and four crosses pattées stretched around her head, interrupted by a larger cross at the front and centre, in which was embedded the Koh-i-Noor. She would wear the crown at each of her husband’s State Openings of Parliament, and also at her own daughter’s coronation, when the present monarch Queen Elizabeth II took the throne on 2 June 1953.

  Though the British had come to believe that the Koh-i-Noor’s curse would only bring down a male monarch, it seems Queen Elizabeth II is taking no chances, and she has refrained from wearing the jewel. It now sits on display at the Jewel House in the Tower of London, but retirement for the Koh-i-Noor has not been altogether peaceful.