Empire: World History - 11. Queens and the Koh-i-Noor

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Join William and Anita for the final episode in their series on the Koh-i-Noor diamond. This remarkable story includes Prince Albert’s inadvertent creation of Britain’s first sauna, an elderly Duke of Wellington cutting the diamond, and the contemporary significance of the Koh-i-Noor. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Twitter: @empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Welcome back to Empire. I am William Delrimple. And I am still anita Arndt. Nothing changed. Nothing has changed as that. So we have just got the Coedore onto the Steam Sloop Medea. And this cursed diamond is crossing the waves at speed towards Great Britain and Queen Victoria.

But you won't be surprised to hear that it is not an easy voyage. No, it really, really isn't an easy voyage because just days into this voyage. And we're talking now, just to remind you of dates here, this is April 1850. So it is crossing the water only a few days in, the first person falls down dead. With cholera. Then another. Then another. Nobody panic. We are very, very close to Mauritius. So we will go and we will disembark on Mauritius.

Really not far. I mean, honestly, this is just nonsensical. So we'll be fine. We'll get to Maricious and we'll be okay. They get to the territorial waters around Maricious and Maricious trains their guns on this ship. Say, I'm sorry, plague ship. Do you think you're coming up? You're not. And if you come any closer, we will fire, we'll torpedo you out of the sea. well, the equivalent, we'll shoot you out of the sea. What would you say? Cannon you out of the sea? Blow you out of the sea. Okay, we will blow you out of the sea. So this panic-stricken crew cannot disembark. They can't separate from each other.

All Mauritius will do is send them a modicum of water, fresh water, a little bit of medicine, not very much, and a few provisions. And Paul O'D Lockyer has to say, okay, boys, onwards. It's okay. Don't panic. Don't panic. We're going to make this. We are made of stern stuff. And they're still dropping like flies at this point? I mean, one presumed so. We don't have detailed medical accounts from this, apart from the references to cholera in the first few days of the outbreak and the Mauritians' reaction to it. But then Lockyer says, right, we're going to go on. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. They sail into one of the worst typhoons in a decade, which almost breaks, they say, the main sale. So, you know, this bore ship is battered, buffeted.

Everyone thinks, first of all, they're going to die of cholera. Then they think they're going to drown at sea. And it carries on and it limps on and it limps on. And finally, this beleaguered ship reaches British territorial waters. And the sailors must have been like, oh, thank goodness, never thought this would happen. And the first of the Coenor's malign axe begins to unfold on British soil. Well, isn't it odd? Because it just enters British territorial waters.

and the first of a number of unfortunate incidents takes place. So Robert Peel, who's a former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and who is also a favourite of Queen Victoria because he's so very kind to Prince Albert. He's one of their chief allies when Albert's not very popular in the court. It is Peel who paves the way to make him acceptable in the British court. Peel is an experienced horseman. He is outriding on Constitution Hill and he is thrown by his horse, which is weird and unfortunate.

But the horse then trips over Peel and falls on Peel, which is, and kills him. Which is just bizarre. This is the day the ship has entered British territorial waters. As if that is not odd enough. So anyway, the ship unloads its precious cargo, and it's only then that the crew find out what is on board the ship. And they must go, oh, my, that's what it was. This damned stone was trying to drag us all to hell. A fast rider with members of the East India Company as retinue do a ride to London.

They've got to get the stone to present it to Queen Victoria. As it's getting closer, it's like just a day out from reaching Queen Victoria. And she's attacked by a lunatic in the crowd. A man called Robert Francis Pate while she's visiting her uncle in London, leaps out of the crowd, and hits her over the head. It's sort of deemed to be quite a bungled either assassination attempt or the act of a madman,

but he slams her over the head with a metal-tipped cane. So when she finally does accept the Coenor, she does so with a massive shiner. She's got a black eye, which maybe explains why she's not, if you look at her diary entries,

because Queen Victoria is a great diarist, when she writes about the Coenor, it isn't with that much enthusiasm. It also explains why not long after this you get Wilkie Collins writing the Moonstone because these stories begin to circulate. Tell people about the Moonstone and not everyone will have read it. So the Moonstone is supposed to be the first ever detective story and it's the story of a cursed Indian gem which comes to Britain

and that creates havoc around it and then is stoned. And it turns out that the people who've stoned it are the same. the stone's original guardians who bring it back to India and the novel closes with the stone back in the idol in... An idol. I mean, you know, it's a very loosely disguised version of the co-euvre.

And so what's fascinating is that this is a trope which then enters European and British and European literature and we get cast stones as, you know, as later as Tintin in the 1950s and 1960s. But the origin of it is not just the Coenor itself, but a whole trope in ancient Indian literature where diamonds are considered to be inauspicious,

going right back to the Bhagwabbaran. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, the first episode that we've done on this podcast is filled with all of that mythology, if you want to go back if you hadn't listened to it yet. But this begins to circulate in the British press. And the British press is, on one hand, very excited that this symbol of empire

and the symbol of the bounty of India. And it's, I think, quite important to sort of think back to that time, because today, I think people are very aware that, you know, looting, colonial loot in war is a very bad thing. There's been a lot of reporting from Ukraine about the Russians taking stuff from museums in in southern Ukraine. There's also been obviously a huge amount of, there are movies, there are novels, there's a whole libraries written on the Nazi looting of Jewish art treasures during

the Second World War. The Italians are obsessed about Napoleon pitching their. art treasures and taking them to the Louvre. And one of the things that, you know, all this raises is, is there any moral distinction between the Nazis taking a fantastic shagal or some extraordinary art treasure from a house in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 or 1941? And the British running off with the Coenor or the throne of Ranjit Singh or any of the other things that lie around the VNA or the British Museum in the 19th. century. And we'll come back to this at the end of this issue, but it's just, I think,

worth placing this here that this is, you know, this is very tricky territory. And while it makes a very jolly narrative and, you know, you and I have greatly enjoyed researching this story and the, uh, and all the, the, the dark incidents that are alleged to be, uh, around the stone. Some directly connected with the stone. Some like the cholera, you know, possibly a completely, um, accidental, uh, happening. Nonetheless, this is something which impacts on the British public and they are very excited about the arrival of the stone and

the stone's great apogee comes shortly after it does it does but just before that I mean you're absolutely right about this sort of you know the swirling mythology of the Coenor and its curse is so prevalent at this time not just among the British people but the monarch so Queen Victoria

gets really quite nervous about taking possession of this diamond and there are letters that are going back and forth from Queen Victoria to India. Is it cursed? Is this thing cursed? Is it cursed? Can you please assure me that it's not cursed? And lots of old India hands write letters. I think Richard Burton, for example, the great explorer of the Hejahs and one of the sort of archetypal Raj sort of adventurers. He sends letters to the monarch at this point. And so all these old India hands are sort of brought out of

their clubs and dust it. Can she wear it? Is it all right? And at one point, Dahousie gets so frustrated by this nonsense as he sees it. You know, why is she not grateful? Why am I not? Why am I not prime minister yet? I gave her the big, that he actually writes that, you know, if she doesn't want to give it back to me. I will wear it on speculation. It just give it to me. This is like Frodo the Ring of Power or something. But also, it's a round, I mean, just, I think we've forgotten to mention that the potted history of the Coenol was actually, for the British, created by a man who was not a historian. Can we? talk about the MECA.

This is exactly, this is the point of which. So when Dalhousie gets his hands on the Coenor, he wants to know like everybody else. Not only is there a curse, but what is this not going to be with this, Jim? And as the, as he knows that the Coenor was originally

part of the Mogul treasury, I don't think he knows it was part of the peacock, right, but he knows that at some point the moguls possessed it before Nandashar took it. He writes to a young East India Company Fisher who was very interested in gems and he knows this guy because he's a friend of his father called Theo

Metcalf. And Theo Metcalf is a slight wastral. He gets into trouble with women, with dogs and horses. He sounds perfect to write a detailed history. Perfect. Well, exactly. He's not necessarily your first choice. And it's he that then goes around the, because the Red Fort, the

Mogul Empire is still going on very much its last legs there, but until 1857, we're now in the 1840s. It's still there. And the Mongol Emperor is there. And all his princes are there. So Theo is sent up to the Red Fort to interview the treasurers of Chandichauk, the keepers of the mogul, Toshakana, and the various experts and gents,

but also the princes and princesses about the stories of the Coenor. And a lot of the legends of the Coenor come from the document that he produces. There's one copy of it still surviving in the Indian National Archives, which I read when I was writing. The first thing I got my hands. I mean, it was so exciting when you found the Metcalfe thing, which is, you know, in nine. nine parts garbage.

And it's a nine parts garbage is what... It informs... It informs... Everything that's come up to this history we wrote. And it informs the... sort of the neurosis in the royal court of can I wear... I mean, there are also... Actually, it's a two-pronged thing

because Queen Victoria is also acutely sensitive of the deposing of kings. So, you know, what she is not comfortable with the fact that the boy king, an 11-year-old child, who is actually of a similar age to Bertie, her oldest son, has been surrounded by enemies, separated from his mother.

She's a mother at the end of the day as well and has been treated in this way and because she has such favourable reports of Dilip and is becoming quite obsessed with the idea of Dilip Singh. This is all very uncomfortable and that just winds down, healthy up, no end. Anyway, look, she gets over it.

She takes the diamond and they start to think about how to use the diamond and you're right, they have an opportunity a year later. The great exhibition of 1851, the same, the Star attraction is going to be the Coenor, the rock, literally the rock star of this exhibition. And you should set this in the context of how people think about empire in Britain at this point.

If you go to what's now the foreign office, what used to be the old Indoor office, at the top of one of the main staircases is a fresco done by an Italian artist in 18th century. And it's called India gifting her riches to Great Britain. And you have an image of Britannia taking this sort of loot. out of a, is it a gold cauldron? I think so, yeah, something like that. And there are pearls, there are diamonds. And then she's pouring it.

India, the figure of personification of India, is pouring it into the arms of Britannia. And without thinking it through very much, the British public can very much buy into this idea. Oh, yeah. It's a gift. It's a gift from the heavens to enrich this country. And the great exhibition is a version of this. It's to display the wealth of,

of Britain is to display the reach of its empire, the extraordinary products that are being brought in all the way from Hudson Bay Company down to Tasmania. But at the heart of it, at the centre of the exhibition, is the coenor. And this is the point really, which the Coenor enters the British public general view. So it's an excellent build-up and it's a brilliant, and the hype and fury around it at the time in 1851 was intense. Does it shine? Well, no, really not so much. So it is, It is placed, first of all. This is all Albert. We should say the great exhibition is Albert's brainchild.

It is Albert's attempt to curry favour with the British people as well. And he puts it in an enormous greenhouse, which is called the Crystal Palace. So the Crystal Palace. So look, the thing is about a Crystal Palace is that, and it's in Hyde Park. It's not where we think of Crystal Palace today. The Crystal Palace was this glass edifice in Hyde Park. It's just filled with glass. It's filled with light.

Now, a diamond. And can you just remind you? is again, we're talking about a diamond that is not a diamond as most people would know them to be cut today. So gem cutting technology has been hugely advanced in Europe. And there's now very little problem at all about cutting this hardest of stones. But in India still, they love the old mogul cut, which is basically leaving it more or less naive as it is, taking it almost as it appears from the ground and maybe giving it a little bit of a rose cut, it's called a very simple faceting.

But the Indians have no taste yet for what we have in Europe, which is called the brilliant cut, the sparkles. And the Coenaud doesn't sparkle. It's just an enormous rock, brilliant and extraordinary, but it's not symmetrical. It doesn't sparkle. And it's not what the Europeans want to see as their rock. And already, in a sense, this has been anticipated by Logan

because when he used to show people the Kohinaw when he's in charge of the Toshakana, he used to make people look at the Kohenor through a peephole. Right. And he would get black velvet and get a, I think, a very strong light coming from underneath an oil lamp. So the thing would sparkle as diamonds were meant to do. But lost in the crystal balance.

Albert doesn't think this through. He puts it on a very lavish cushion of velvet, rich purple velvet, we're told. And, you know, people come and they look at it. First of all, actually, what they do is they go running off in the wrong direction. There's a big lump of quartz as one of the exhibits. And they go, ooh, the Coenor. And when they're told, no, that's not it.

It's over there. In comparison, the Coenor is really dull. It's small and it's boring. And not symmetrical. It's got this dome and this tail. Yes, the Arthur's seat analogy, which I've always love. I think it's fabulous. Or the really expensive tadpole.

So people go away, and they're very, rude about it. So Albert is not happy because this is, you know, this is his reputation is on the line. So first of all, they change out the colours around it. Okay, if not purple, then dark crimson. That's not working. So he starts to put mirrors around it thinking, okay, that will reflect the light. That doesn't work. First, then it's gas lamps and mirrors and that doesn't work. Then it's, he realizes quite late in the day and quite astonishingly late in the day that it's natural light that is defeating all of these gas lamps. So he builds like a wooden shed. type thing around it.

But creating inadvertently Britain's first sauna. Exactly. You know, so people go in to have a look. After all this tinkering, they go in to look at the Kono. Some of them are coming out, having passed out in here. You know, so again, that curse of the Konoa, that, you know, looking at it as a dangerous thing becomes embedded. But the expectations that are built up, there are cues across London.

I think is it a third of the country? A third of the country will file through those doors of the, the I mean, it's astonishing. That's just, even today, that's crazy. And to a man, they look at the diamond and they go, nah. Neh, it's all right. It's not what they've been led to believe. No, so, you know, at the end of the great exhibition in October 1851, the diamond

is taken back to the tower in disgrace. But Albert's not going to leave it there. This has been humiliation for him. So you know what, this errant child, like the errant child who's in India, who has been recut and is being reformed into this British gentleman, Duleep Singh, this diamond too is going to be brought into line. So what Albert does is he goes around and he asks all of his experts. He says, look, can you cut it?

And they all go, no, actually, no. He goes to David Brewster, the father of optics, a physicist in this country. He goes, can we cut it? And he says, no, it's got a fault at its heart. If you try and cut it, this thing is going to disintegrate. Do not cut it. He's advised time and again, do not. cut it. But, you know, there's that saying, he who pays the piper. So he starts casting about

in Amsterdam, where the best diamond cutters are. And he finds Moses Custer, who's a really renowned diamond cutter. And Moses Custer says, what do you want to do? How much you're paying? Sure, we'll be right over. And he sends his team, his crack team of diamond cutters to England to cut the Cohenore. And they set up a sort of stall. the haymarket. So it's a workshop. It's a little factory, you know. And it's what's really interesting.

This is so, I mean, so interesting. The Coenor is so famous that even while they're constructing this sort of shared workshop around it, where they're going to use state-of-the-art diamond cutting tools, things like a shafer. It's called a scapefer. I think I'm saying it badly, but it's a whirring round wetstone upon which you grind out the facets of a diamond. That's what they're going to use. So they're assembling all of this. And there are people sort of assembled outside as if, you know, it's like a hospital bed for an intensive care patient.

But if that was exciting enough, wait till you're here. So who is going to do the first cut? The first cut. I mean, not just a celebrity. The celebrity. And if you want to know who that is. You have to wait for the next segment. Come back after the break.

Welcome back to Empire. So we finally got the Coenor to England. It has been on in the first. great exhibition, but it has disgraced itself by not shining enough. So the state-of-the-art diamond cutters have been summoned from Amsterdam, a workshop has been set up in the haymarket, and who, Anita, has been called to do the first cut. Well, I feel like there should be a drum roll. Here, live from fighting Napoleon, it is Old Nosey himself, the Iron Duke, it is no less than Wellington. Wellington, who is... As seen on your five-pound notes. As on your five-pound note,

he is at this time is he 8 or 79 at this time he's like he's an old he's very old he's a very old man with you know the gnarled hands of a warrior you know sort of like ginger his hands are sort of all you know big twisted and old and the diamond cut is a bit worried by this so they covered up I mean naturally yeah naturally they are so what they do is they think okay you know in case of a tremble this is not going to go well

so they encase the whole thing in lead apart from one facet that he is going to ceremoniously grind out that first face. Which he then cuts. And this is more or less the Duke's final act because he drops down dead shortly after. He never gets to see the finished items. So again, oh, go in Australia. But can you tell us why? Why is it important? It's important for the crowds who are outside Haymarket. Oh, by the way, it's a hilarious thing that he turns up, ignores all the crowds. He hates crowd, hates people, comes in, does his grinding, says nothing and leaves. But what is it about Wellington's past, Wellington's ties with India, that makes this such an important thing, and he wants to do it? From what we understand, he asked to do it.

Correct. So the Duke of Wellington made his name in India. And the Duke's very first command was against Tipu Sultan in 1799. He was responsible for the security after the conquest of Sri Rangipatnam, Tipu's capital. It's sometimes said in history books that he led the attack on Tipu. In fact, that's not true. There was a guy called Harris and another guy called David Baird. And it's David Baird who famously discovers the body of Tipu and there's a famous wonderful picture in the Scottish National Gallery of this event.

But Wellington has defeated the Marathas in 1803 in the Marauder war. And he famously says that they were much tougher adversaries than Napoleon. Than Napoleon? Is it the Battle of Versailles? Battle of USA, exactly. The battle in which the Duke lost the most of his soldiers. He won the battle, but it was almost a Pyrrhic victory because half his troops die in the battle. Anyway, he makes the cut.

He then drops down dead as anyone male associated with the Cohenol seems to do. But the cut itself is hugely controversial. Massively so, because, you know, those people who were telling Prince Arbott, what he didn't want to hear, that you cannot cut this thing. cut it. It's got a floor. It's hard. It will go up. I mean, some have, you know, warned him that it's like carbon at the end of the day. It will go

up in, you know, ash. Don't do it. And it's so irregular and it's such a mess that they, I mean, you expect to lose a little bit of your diamond when you cut it. But in the case of the Coenol, and I've got the figures in front of me, the cut practically halves the Coenor. It goes from 190.9.3 metric

carrots to just 93 metric carrots. I mean, that's, we just, to half the mass of a great diamond. So it comes out of this cut, you know, half the size he went in. Yeah. It's not, I mean, it's not a success, but it does sparkle. Do you know, do you know who else is being diminished at the same time? Go back to Dulip Singh. So this is now 1842, 1852.

So now, for the last three years, remember, since 1849, since he signed over his kingdom and the diamond. Doleep Singh has been in the care of the Logans and he has been growing up like a good little boy and pleasing them all and goodness knows the trauma that he's buried deep inside because he's not seen his mother. He doesn't have any friends from his old life. He doesn't, you know, he's not the Maharaja anymore. They do this weird thing, the Logans, to try and keep him happy. They really are trying to keep him happy. But they give him jewels from the Thorshakana, which he then has to give back. You know, so like happy birthday. here are some jewels, but he doesn't get to keep them.

He just gets to wear them to make him happy because it's what would happen when he's the Maharaja. So tragedy upon tragedy, but, you know, he's thriving, they say. And he's corresponding with Queen Victoria, and this correspondence is becoming rather warm. It's very warm. Now, when he says, just before his 16th birthday, I would like to see the Maharani of the world,

Queen Victoria is really enthusiastic. She says, oh God, let him come. I can't. That's exciting. And all of her advisors, including the Prime Minister at the time, they don't do it. Do not do this because if you show this kind of favour, it goes to these heathen princes heads. But she does. She went here in the matter. She wants to meet him.

She wants to meet him very much. So he comes over in 1854 and immediately is embraced within the royal family. You know, like this is a really controversial thing. Do you remember when we we toured in India and I would say this to an Indian crowd and they would sort of bridle that I think there was real love there between these two. You know, she she was enchanted by him, by his manners and his beauty more than anything. He was really very, very beautiful. By the stage he's how old? 16, just before his 16, Bethlehem. He turned 16 here. A beautiful young man. So, you know, just again, just worth

almost sort of feline kind of features, you know, very fine featured, narrow face, narrow forehead, very sort of distinguished aquiline nose like his mother, almond-shaped eyes, with very thick eyelashes, you know, beautiful, deep, brown eyes. You can tell why she was enchanted by him. He was a really pretty boy. But he gets taken to Osbourne and he is immediately in the inner sanctum. So they start playing, you know, they play games at Osborne. All the princes and princesses they dress up and do their little plays and he ties turbans around the boys and because he knows how to do it and they wear Indian clothes and they eat Indian food. And if you've gone to

Osborne, you can really see the stamp of India at Osbourne House. Most touchingly, what he does is, and she notices this and writes about it in her diary, Queen Victoria, that he never leaves out Leopold. So Bertie and the others, they're all a bit rough and tumble. And little Leopold has hemophilia and is always left

behind in all the games. But Deleap will always scoop him up and put him on his shoulders so he's not left behind. So she's struck by the enormous kindness. And they spend hours sketching each other. And if you go to Osbourne as well in the Royal Collection, There are these beautiful sketches that Victoria does of Dilip and Dilip does of Queen Victoria. So, you know, obviously this is going to be a happily ever after story, isn't it?

But it's the Coen-Aul. But it's the Coen-Aul. So for his birthday, the Queen has decided in July 1854 that she's going to have a portrait painted of him by Winterhalter, who we've spoken about before in this podcast, who's a great court artist, her favourite court artist. and it's going to be done in Buckingham Palace and it's going to be done in the white drawing room and Dilip is on a pedestal in all his finery he is dripping with pearls

and emeralds and jewels and around his neck The British had taken them all from him Well but they you know they lend them back for this This picture and he's got it what is really I think significant About the Winterhalter and if you can look it up do look it up Is he wears a little cameo of Queen Victoria around his throat And he will wear one near his heart

and we'll do so for most of his life apart from this very turbulent period where he turns viciously against Queen Victoria. But this painting is being done and during his posing of this painting this charade is played out because Queen Victoria, you know, the diamond's been cut I don't know if he even knows the diamond has been cut.

The one thing out of all the finery, all the jewels and stuff that is absent from his arm you know, must have felt really light without it is the Coenor that as a little boy he had strapped to his arm. Yeah, that was exactly the painting. I mean, just describe what you see in case I haven't done it justice. It has Dulip Singh as a beautiful 16-year-old with the beginnings of a beard because he is only 16, although he's tall and commanding. Well, actually, you know, he cheated that.

He was actually short. But Winterhalter cheats the perspective to make him look taller. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he's wearing around his neck are about 10 strings of pearls. which tumble down onto his chest,

there is this little cameo of Queen Victoria in the middle of all these pearls. He's got a turban on, the turban is dripping with jewels too, and there's a fantastic Saupesh, that's a turban ornament, and he's in sort of cloth of gold. The whole outfit is sort of fantastically gilt

from sort of shining gilt churidas or pajama bottoms, golden slippers with, turned up ends. He has a wonderful Sikh scimitar in his hand. And it's, I mean, it is quite simply one of the great portraits of, not only the Victorian period, but one of the greatest portraits to come out of the British encounter with India. And, you know, it's, and it's also the fantasy of India. You know, there's the embodiment of what India is. It is exotic and beautiful and dangerous, you know, the presence of the cimitar. I think that all of these things, all pictures at that time, it's all laden with meaning. So anyway, it's both, you know, it's

interesting because, you know, yes, it's orientalist and that they've, you know, they've done him up as he would be in court, the court that they abolished. And they've covered him with jewels, the jewels that don't belong to him anymore. They took from him. And they make him look like a prince when he's lost his kingdom. Yeah, he has the title. He retains Maharaja, but that's it. So anyway, during this time, so Queen Victoria's been really, really nervous because the diamond's been cut, but she hasn't yet worn it in public because she's really fond of Dilip. I mean, like, spectacular. fond of Delibe. So she doesn't want to hurt him. She wants to know how he'll react if she does wear the diamond. So she quietly on the never-never asks Lady Logan, how do you think he'll react? And Lady Logan, who writes a brilliant memoir, you know, which is a fabulous account at the time, Lady Logan's recollections. She says, you know, I actually didn't tell the Queen the truth. I said,

oh, I'm not sure how he'll react. Whereas I knew there was no one subject that obsessed the Maharaja and more. So the Queen tells Lady Logan, take him riding before we do the portrait and ask him. And Lady Logan does this. She says, you know, if you did see the Coenor, would that be all right? And Deleap is quiet and gives a quite enigmatic reply, but it's not fury and it's not tears and it's not rage. So she reports back saying, I think it'll be okay. And then, so cut forward again to this portrait by Winterharto being painted of this beautiful boy on a pedestal. He's standing in the white drawing room. Yeah, on a pedestal. And suddenly a frock-coated man comes to the door, bangs on the door, comes in with a casket in his hand.

And Queen Victoria goes over and opens the casket. He goes, oh, Dilip! Dillip, would you like to come and have a look at something you might be interested? So he steps down off the dice. He has no idea what's kind of, and we know this accurately from Lady Logan, who was there in the room when it happened. And he walks over and she holds out the konoat and she says breezily, it's much change since you last saw it half the size

and he looks at it and Lena Logan describes how his face goes through an entire year of seasons as he looks at it and everybody like no one can breathe so it's Queen Victoria then drops it in his hand and Lena Logan's really nervous

like what's he going to do because this may be too much for him and he takes the diamond over to the open window of the white drawing room and holds it up to the light and Lena Logan says you can't breathe because what's he going to throw it out the window he might you know and after what seems like an age he comes back to Queen Victoria and says it is me it is to me ma'am a great pleasure to present to you the Coenol as if he has the power as if he has the right to do anything else but it's all she needs to hear because from the moment he does that

she then wears it in public. At state occasions, it will actually, in fact, after Albert dies and she puts all her other baubles away, be the one diamond she still wears with her black and honitin lace. But that is the moment when she thinks it's okay to wear it.

And she has a special fitting made for it. We've seen, yes, we've found the receipts from Garards. You know, they make this wonderful brooch setting with a really clever clip that you can pop it out. And then put it in a crown as well. So it could be both a brooch and a standalone object of its own. And standalone and also be placed in a crown. But after her death, it's never worn again by any other monarch.

No, it is not been worn by a monarch. But it has been worn by the queen consort ever since. So again, you know, it's maybe they're not so important. And if they die, hideous death. I don't know. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying it. The story which I think is either Manistair Elfinston or Richard Burton sends to the Queen, which is only one version of the many myths, which there are,

is that the curse only affects a man. A man. Yeah, that's it. And this is the version that's accepted by Queen Victoria. So whether or not the curse is, whether or not there's any truth in it, whether or not whatever the curse is, this is the one that the royal family come to recognize as the truth. I'm just going to say one little thing, because again, it's a whole other pod. cast maybe about Dilip Singh's life from that moment when he plops the stone.

But just suffice to say he may well be yet another victim of the Coenol curse if you believe in such things. Tell us the story. So this is a boy that was born in Lahore, the one survivor of this bloodbath in the Lahore Darbar. He's taken on Christianity. He's become an intimate of Queen Victoria. He has given, as far as he can, the throne to his new sovereign.

He's very much the kind of, you know, the blue-eyed boy. Suddenly the brown-eyed boy. For a long time, he remains a favourite of the court. He becomes... Very tragic story. Becomes very much embittered against Queen Victoria because he suddenly, at a later point in midlife, starts to believe that he was cheated.

That it is illegal, in fact, what they did to him as a minor to take him away from his mother and make him sign a contract. It is now not a contract because he was a minor when he signed it. So he starts to challenge that. To the point where he says he's going to get India back and he becomes an implacable and... of the British state. He refers to Queen Victoria's Mrs. Fagin, the receiver of stolen goods. He has this idea that he will sail back to India and do a deal with the Tsar, because the great game is afoot,

and they will together pincer the British out of the north of India, that his Sikhs will rise up on his behalf, and the Russians will push over, and together they will squeeze out the British. He doesn't get further than the port of Aden. He is not allowed. to go through the Suez Canal. He is arrested with his very young family. His children are arrested. And he then becomes this sort of exile in Europe where he tries. You know, he's scrabbling around for money.

He is broke. He's had to sell his wonderful hall at Elvenden. I mean, he sells all that thinking he's going to, you know, use the money to get back to India. He fritters it away because he is a gambler and, you know, carouser. He dumps his wife and family, which is, Another story. But everything he does is failed from that point on because British agents are on him like flies. So everything he does, his money is pickpocketed, his papers are denied, the Tsar won't meet him,

and he ends up dying alone and broke in a Parisian hotel. It's the most tragic story. It's unbelievable, you know. So shall we now talk about the role of the Coenor in the present day, William? because it may be a stone of antiquity, but it really is still this diplomatic grenade, isn't it? I mean, it's a live issue, and things have changed and moved on since we wrote the book.

That's absolutely right. When we wrote the book, the Coenor had just been placed on the coffin of the Queen Mother, and people were queuing to see her to pay their final respects, and there was the Coenor glinting in Westminster Hall. But no one knew what was going to happen in the future. And now we do because King Charles III is now on the throne. And Camilla is his queen consort and that crown will be worn at the coronation.

Yeah, and they've said nothing to disabuse the world of this notion that the Conna will still be in the Queen Consort's crown. I mean, often it is not unusual or unheard of for crowns to be sort of reconfigured or gems to be prized out and repositioned. for every queen who takes over. They have different tastes, they have different desires. So that has happened in the past. But nobody has given anyone an inkling that this is off to garards to be refashioned. So as things stand, it will still be there. And the result in India, William, what do you think?

I mean, you're somebody who spends more time in India than I do. So when the queen died, every single Indian newspaper, every news channel, every documentary in India did something on the Kohinor. and there is widespread expectation, I think, in India, that it will come back. Meanwhile, no one in Britain even realizes that it's an issue. There's simply been no coverage of it, that the, no understanding that this is a major issue. And I think what it shows, above all, is that this diamond, which throughout its entire history has created division, bloodshed, misunderstanding, has lost none of its power, that it's doing it perhaps more than ever on a continental scale, though. Yeah, yeah.

And particularly, you know, when you've got somebody who is running India at the moment for whom this will be a coup, if he can get the diamond to come back, you know, this is a man who wants to write the wrongs, he says, of colonialism. He renames things in India so that they divest themselves of the colonial past. What a what an impetus for him to put diplomatic and political pressure on Britain to get it back. But I don't think the British establishment is aware of this. And as far as the government is concerned, they're logging for good relations with India and hoping for better trade with India and so on. And at some point, I think, you know, the penny will have to drop that there are things that India wants back from Britain. You said Penny, but the diamond will make a bigger thunk than that. Anyway, wherever it drops, we'll be dropping at the same time next week with another episode

of Empire. So that's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, you did you do so well. Honestly.