Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  As the Bombay shoreline faded in the distance, Captain Ramsay produced four keys, each of which opened one of the locks in the chest, the dispatch box and the safe. He kept two keys for himself and gave the other two to Mackeson. Complicity between the three men would now be needed to free the diamond from its hiding place. With nothing but the deep blue sea around them, anyone thinking of stealing the gem would have nowhere to take it. The diamond was safe.

  After around ten days at sea, Lockyer discovered another concealed passenger aboard his ship. Medea was carrying cholera. He found this out only when two of his 135 crewmen were found dead below decks and others started complaining of nausea and diarrhoea. Cholera outbreaks had wiped out entire crews in the past and, surrounded by the Indian Ocean, there was nothing Captain Lockyer could do to stop its deadly progress. He must have thanked his lucky stars that Mauritius, and the promise of medicine and treatment for his men, was close by. The captain did his best to reassure his men that fresh supplies and doctors would be with them soon.

  However when Medea reached the coast, the Mauritians refused to have anything to do with the cholera-plagued ship. They demanded the immediate departure of Medea and her infected crew. When Lockyer refused to comply, the Mauritian authorities threatened to open fire and destroy the vessel, drowning the captain and all his men. After delicate negotiations between the ship and the shore, Lockyer finally convinced the Mauritians to part with 130 tons of coal to power the ship away from their coastline. Though the islanders threw in a small amount of medicine, it was hardly enough, and neither food nor water was provided.21 Frightened and feverish, the crew of Medea had no choice but to continue on their way to England, praying for deliverance.

  Deliverance did not come. Before long HMS Medea’s crew faced fresh peril as the ship sailed straight into a gale. High winds tossed the crew around for what seemed like an eternity. The rigging was stretched to snapping point, and the depleted men fought to save their mainsail from the waves. So severe was the storm that at one point Medea threatened to break entirely in half. Sailors prayed with renewed fervour, while Lockyer, Mackeson and Ramsay, the three men who knew about the Koh-i-Noor and the dark curse that went with it, might have wondered whether the jewel was dragging them all to hell. The storm lasted for twelve hours before the skies cleared and the waters calmed.

  Medea limped into Plymouth on 30 June 1850. By now, the press had been alerted to the Koh-i-Noor’s arrival, and crowds gathered at the docks to greet it. The Morning Post had been one of the first newspapers to break the news. Though the rest of the ship’s cargo was unloaded on the quay, the Koh-i-Noor stayed aboard: ‘The priceless Koh-i-noor has arrived … The jewel was not transhipped, but taken to Portsmouth in the Medea, where it remained on board last night …’22

  When Medea finally reached Portsmouth a day later, officers of the 22nd Foot, and a man called Onslow, private secretary to the chairman of the East India Company, were waiting to receive it. They took the diamond in its many layers of concealment and, accompanied by an exhausted Ramsay and Mackeson, sped away in a special train to London and the headquarters of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street. There the wooden box and four keys were solemnly handed over to the Company’s chairman, John Shepherd, who accepted them on behalf of his queen. With the Koh-i-Noor on British soil at last, the press were free to pore over the diamond’s exotic and blood-soaked history. The newspapers were filled with stories of Ranjit Singh and his son, the boy king. The terrible curse, said to afflict the owners of the diamond, made for irresistible reading around the breakfast tables of Britain, and it was perhaps inevitable that recent worrying events were linked to its arrival.

  While Medea was preparing to enter British territorial waters, Queen Victoria had been visiting her dying uncle in London. As she left his home, Cambridge House, a grand Palladian-style mansion in Piccadilly, a smartly dressed man approached her carriage and struck her over the head with a thin black cane with an iron handle. The blow was hard enough to crush her bonnet and draw blood. The attacker, Robert Francis Pate, a former British army officer, appeared to have no motive for his actions. The Standard was just one of the newspapers which ran the story of the Koh-i-Noor’s arrival right next to a detailed account of the attack on the queen. Such juxtapositions in print merely fuelled the rumours about the diamond’s dark powers.

  Two days later, on 3 July, Queen Victoria greeted the president of the Board of Control, Sir John Hobhouse, and the chairman and deputy chairman of the East India Company, with a black eye and a prominent cut on her forehead where the cane had hit her. She would be left with the scar for years to come. Though she was receiving the most famous jewel in the world, Victoria’s mind seemed to be on other things. She was distracted by the death of her great confidant, the former prime minister Sir Robert Peel. A political giant of his day, Peel had served in high office for almost forty years, and had been prime minister twice. At the age of sixty-two, his death came entirely out of the blue. For his customary early evening ride on 29 June, Peel had chosen to saddle one of the newer horses in his stable, a thoroughbred hunter acquired only a few weeks before.

  Although he did not know it, the horse had a reputation for kicking and bucking. It started acting up as he rode along Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. Though he fought to control it, the horse threw him into the street. As Peel lay face down in the road, the skittish horse tripped over his body and fell on top of him, crushing him badly. Peel suffered broken ribs and a fractured collarbone. It later transpired that he also had severe internal bleeding. He died on 2 July, the very day the Koh-i-Noor reached London. On the 3rd, the day Hobhouse presented the great diamond to his queen, he did so against a backdrop of national mourning.

  Queen Victoria’s diary entry for that day is eight pages long, filled with her own personal grief for the man she described as ‘so eminent a subject, so able a statesman, and so good a man’. Victoria was struggling to come to terms with her own pain as well as the grief of her husband, Prince Albert. Albert had been unpopular with her subjects after their marriage, and Sir Robert Peel had not only been a great adviser and ally to him, he had worked hard to give the prince a better reputation among his people. Summing up the mood of her people, Victoria wrote: ‘From the highest to the lowest grief is shown and felt in a manner hardly ever before known for a person in his position. All the lower and middle classes realize that they have lost a father and a friend.’23

  The Koh-i-Noor, by contrast, merited only a couple of paragraphs in her diary:

  We saw Sir J. Hobhouse who brought the two principal Members of the East Indian Company, Sir James Hogg & Mr Shepperd, who delivered up to me, with a short speech, the celebrated Koh-I-Noor, the largest diamond in the world, which comes from Lahore & belonged to Runjiet Sing, who took it from Shah Shoojah. It is estimated to be worth £500,000, & the two diamonds on either side, £10,000! Unfortunately it is not set ‘à jour’, & badly cut, which spoils the effect …24

  The Koh-i-Noor had finally made it into the queen’s hands, but the Mountain of Light had spectacularly failed to shine in her eyes.

  Back in India, Dalhousie was incandescent at the perceived ingratitude. Writing to a friend he fumed:

  I received yesterday your letter of the 16th July. The several sad or foul […] events in England on which it touches have been mentioned to me heretofore, and they are too sad to recur [sic] to. You add that these mishaps lie at my door, as I have sent the Koh-i-noor which always brings misfortune to its possessor. Whoever was the exquisite person from whom you heard this … he was rather lame both on his history and tradition.

  Dalhousie then went on to give a potted history of the diamond:

  Without going back to the first emperors who held it, I would observe that Nadir Shah who took it was usually reckoned well to do in the world throughout his life; and that Runjeet Singh who also took it, and became, from the son of a petty zeminder, the most powerful native prince in India, and lived and died th
e power most formidable to England, and her best friend, has usually been thought to have prospered tolerably. As for tradition, when Shah Shoojah, from whom it was taken, was afterwards asked, by Runjeet’s desire, ‘what was the value of the Koh-i-noor?’ he replied, ‘Its value is Good Fortune; for whoever possesses it has been superior to all his enemies.’25

  In closing, Dalhousie challenged the diamond’s detractors to come up with sure-footed evidence if they wanted to malign his gift: ‘Perhaps your friend would favour you with his authority, after this, for his opposite statement. I sent the Queen a narrative of this conversation with Shah Shoojah, taken from the mouth of the messenger.’26

  With this, Dalhousie hoped to silence once and for all the rumours that had rumbled around the diamond since the fourteenth century. In later years he would become so exasperated by the recurring theme of the diamond’s curse that he would write: ‘if H.M. thinks it brings bad luck, let her give it back to me. I will take it and its ill-luck on speculation’.27

  9

  The Great Exhibition

  As subdued as she had seemed in her journal upon receiving the Mountain of Light, Victoria was ebullient on the day the Koh-i-Noor, and other treasures, were to be revealed to the world: 1 May 1851 was to mark the most anticipated event in her reign. The queen, like the rest of her subjects, was beside herself with excitement at the mere thought of it: ‘This day is one of the greatest and most glorious of our lives … it is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness …’1

  Though the loss of Robert Peel had been felt keenly by both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, an ambitious project had dragged them from their sadness. The Great Exhibition, or to give its full title, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, was to be the greatest show on earth, and it was to take place in London, the heart of Victoria’s empire.

  It had helped that Peel himself had been a champion of the Great Exhibition. He had devoted months of his time and expertise to the event, and had been at a planning meeting on the very day he was fatally thrown from his horse. Victoria and Albert were determined that his efforts should not have been in vain. The Great Exhibition was to be a showcase for the very best examples of culture, industry and beauty. Albert had been instrumental at every stage, coaxing and cajoling his way through British bureaucracy to bring the project from the page to Hyde Park.

  The royal couple hoped that the Exhibition’s success might increase Albert’s popularity. Victoria’s subjects deemed him to be beneath her, a minor royal from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, an impoverished and undistinguished state, barely larger than a small English county.2 Parliament also treated him with condescension, reducing his allowance from £50,000, the usual sum granted to a sovereign spouse, to £30,000, and refusing to grant him a peerage. Lord Melbourne, Peel’s predecessor as prime minister, had personally thwarted the queen’s desire to give her husband the title of ‘king consort’. Albert was left feeling deeply undervalued as a result.

  The Great Exhibition was his chance to show the country what he was really made of. In a letter to her uncle Leopold, the King of the Belgians, Victoria brimmed with pride for her husband: ‘My Dearest Uncle – I wish you could have witnessed the 1st May 1851, the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen … truly it was astonishing, a fairy scene. Many cried, and all felt touched and impressed with devotional feelings …’3

  The venue for the Exhibition was the Crystal Palace, a vast edifice of glass and metal, specially constructed for the occasion. The complex, situated in one of London’s largest areas of greenery, Hyde Park, was vast. Some 1,848 feet long and 408 feet wide, it covered around nineteen acres of land. The structure was big enough to incorporate a number of trees. Some 13,000 objects and curiosities had been shipped over from around the world and placed in tastefully curated galleries under the Crystal Palace’s immense glass roof. Cutting through the structure, a large central boulevard dotted with trees, fountains and statues formed the backbone of the Exhibition, giving the space an altogether Parisian elegance. Though the uniquely beautiful building caused excitement, the promise of one particular exhibit eclipsed all other press coverage in the run-up to the opening. The Great Exhibition would provide Britons with their first chance to see the Koh-i-Noor diamond for themselves. The jewel was to be the star attraction, and its image and name were used liberally in the newspapers to drum up interest. Around six million people, a third of the entire population of Great Britain, were expected to attend the Exhibition between 1 May and 11 October 1851.4

  On the day the Exhibition opened its doors, The Times, usually a sober and weighty newspaper, became positively effervescent:

  Never before was so vast a multitude gathered together within the memory of man. The struggles of great nations in battle, the levies of whole races, never called forth such an army as thronged the streets of London on the 1st of May … The blazing arch of lucid glass with the hot sun flaming on its polished ribs and sides shone like the Koh-i-Noor itself.

  The sun had not even risen when the British public began to converge on the Exhibition. By breakfast, there was hardly space to move on the streets surrounding Hyde Park, as the multitudes made their way to the great glass building: ‘If a man ventured into the Strand or Holborn at eight o’clock with the intent to see the show, he felt half inclined to turn back with the idea that it would be useless to go where “all the world” would be before him.’5

  Visitors from every social class came in their finest clothes. Aristocrats abandoned their carriages in the snarled-up streets and walked among the crush of commoners. The pilgrimage to the Crystal Palace was made in relentless drizzle, bedraggling rich and poor in equal measure. When the crowds finally reached the doors of the Exhibition, they had hours more to stand in the rain, which got heavier as the minutes ticked by. Undeterred, they waited patiently for the queen to arrive from Buckingham Palace. Just before noon, the sun broke through the clouds ‘like a miracle’ and ‘to the Royal flourish of trumpets and the rolling of drums’6 the queen in an open carriage, flanked by a ‘troop of Life Guards at the trot’, arrived at the Crystal Palace to a roar of ‘God Save the Queen’. Visibly ‘filled with emotion’, Victoria declared the Great Exhibition open to the public.7

  Many in the waiting crowd made straight for the Koh-i-Noor, which sat on a bolt of rich red velvet inside a gilded iron cage. Policemen, charged with keeping the crowds at bay, were almost lifted off their feet by the surge.

  At the close of the first day, it became clear that something was very wrong with the Koh-i-Noor. Visitors who had managed to get near the exhibit left grumbling. The Illustrated London News, which had been one of the more excitable publications in the run-up to the Exhibition, expressed the disappointment of many:

  A diamond is generally colourless, and the finest are quite free from any speck or flaw of any kind, resembling a drop of the purest water. The Koh-i-Noor is not cut in the best form for exhibiting its purity and lustre, and will therefore disappoint many, if not all, of those who so anxiously press forward to see it.8

  The Koh-i-Noor had appeared dull in its captivity, and the bad publicity it was generating threatened to take the gleam off Prince Albert’s finest moment. In a matter of days, he ordered gas lamps to be placed around the gem to help it shine for the visitors, but these failed to make much difference. Before long, visitors began turning their backs on the Koh-i-Noor, avoiding the exhibit altogether.

  Disappointed and determined to change their minds, Prince Albert ordered work to begin on a new display setting for the Koh-i-Noor. While visitors squeezed past, men worked behind screens, creating a lattice of gas lamps and angled mirrors around the cage. Though such efforts helped, praise for the Koh-i-Noor remained lukewarm. More tinkering was needed.

  On 14 June a dramatic new display was revealed to the public, one which Prince Albert was sure would save its reputation. To signify the importance of the Koh-i-Noor’s re-entry into society, Que
en Victoria, Prince Albert and their two eldest sons attended the unveiling of the freshened-up exhibit. A wooden cabin now surrounded the diamond, blocking out all the natural light streaming through the glass roof and windows of the Crystal Palace. This enabled the gas lamps and mirrors to do their work more efficiently. The original bolt of deep-red cloth which had been arranged beneath the diamond was now substituted with more vibrantly coloured velvet. Reporters bickered over its unusual shade, describing it as anything from shocking pink to imperial violet.

  No other exhibit had received so much attention from the organisers, and early press coverage suggested that their efforts had not been in vain:

  One of the most extraordinary metamorphosis [sic] is the change that has come over the Koh-i-noor diamond. The doubts that have been thrown upon its value and authenticity and the difficulty of fully appreciating its brilliancy in the broad glare of day, have led to the enveloping of the cage and its contents in massive folds of crimson drapery, and showing its splendour by artificial light. The diamond has stood the test wonderfully, and has fully redeemed its character … The difficulty of obtaining access to the cabin in which it is enshrined is little less than those encountered by Aladdin in his visit to the garden of diamonds, and has revived all the attraction and fascination of this famous gem.9

  The reconfigured display made the diamond tantalisingly difficult to get to: ‘You pass in singly – the cage, with the exception of about an eighth of its circumference, is enveloped in pink bolts of cloth; half a dozen jets of gas are arranged behind it, and the light from these is again reflected by more than a dozen small mirrors upon the diamond …’10