Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King. Ben Macintyre

the pressure by depriving the king of the ‘necessaries of life’ which, in the case of Shujah and his luxury-loving entourage, were very considerable. Finally, the reluctant Shah Shujah had agreed to hand over the Koh-i-Noor in exchange for five thousand rupees and a promise that Ranjit would help him regain his crown. Instead of fulfilling his side of the bargain, however, Ranjit set about trying to extract Shujah’s remaining treasure.

      Recalling his pleasant encounter with Elphinstone, Shujah resolved to make a dash for British India. Smuggling out some four hundred wives, children, concubines, eunuchs, retainers and others from under Ranjit’s nose was no easy task, but by bribing his guards, most of the harem was successfully moved to Ludhiana. Ranjit reinforced the ‘bodyguard’ surrounding his royal guest. ‘Seven ranges of guards were put upon our person, and armed men with torches lighted our bed,’ Shujah recorded. Finally the deposed king escaped by secretly tunnelling through several walls and then wriggling to freedom through the main sewer of Lahore, arriving smelly but safe on the other side of the city wall. After a series of adventures that took him through the passes of Lesser Tibet, he eventually reached Ludhiana. ‘Our cares and fatigues were now forgotten and, giving thanks to Almighty God who, having freed us from the hands of our enemies and led us through the snows and over the trackless mountains, had now safely conducted us to the lands of our friends, we passed a night for the first time with comfort and without dread.’ Reunited with his wives and provided with a substantial home and pension by the British, Shah Shujah al-Moolk had settled into comfortable exile, and immediately began plotting his return to Kabul.

      The ousted king was a strange, violent, but curiously romantic figure. Astute, charming, vain and greedy, Shujah could be unexpectedly merciful on occasion, but by inclination he was brutal, capable of the most capricious and revolting cruelty. He had ruled for just six years, but was convinced he would one day return in triumph to Kabul. Visitors were always impressed by his poise, despite the indignities he had suffered, yet there was something mournful about him. It was said that he had been born under an unlucky star. Shujah talked a good military game but tended to balk on the battlefield at the critical moment, and despite removing the crown jewels en masse, he complained that he was almost broke. ‘He wanted vigour,’ wrote one observer. ‘He wanted activity; he wanted judgement; and, above all, he wanted money.’

      Shujah repeatedly lobbied the British for help to win back his throne, but without success. ‘His Majesty strenuously kept alive the impression amongst his followers and contemporaries that he was about to attempt the invasion of Kabul, sustaining their hopes and anticipations,’ wrote Harlan, but the British insisted on maintaining strict neutrality, at least for the time being. The exiled king argued that he did not need a British army, but British cash. ‘Money would readily achieve all that was necessary,’ he had told Captain Wade. ‘By the loaning of a few hundred thousand rupees, he would disseminate confusion amongst his enemies. From the diffusion of gold, he proposed to create and nourish a powerful party that should sustain his own policy and by these means, which have ever been the successful mode of controlling the Avghaun tribes, to mount again that unsteady throne.’

      Harlan discussed Shah Shujah’s predicament with Wade, and found the British agent doubtful that the Afghan king would ever regain his crown. ‘We conversed together upon the future probabilities of Shah Shujah’s restoration,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The subject of Russian influence was even then frequently discussed in the social circles of British India [and] the opinion of Captain W. sunk deep into my mind when he calmly observed, “There is no possible chance for Shujah’s restoration unless an ostensible demonstration of Russian diplomacy should transpire at Kabul”!’ This was Harlan’s initiation into the Great Game, the shadowy struggle between Britain and Tsarist Russia for influence and control in Central Asia. Harlan would later recall the ‘singular prescience’ of Wade’s observation. Fear of Russian encroachment would eventually persuade the British to restore Shah Shujah to his throne, with horrendous consequences.

      The exiled king’s poignant daily cavalcade, the tales of his fabled wealth and the wild, primitive land beckoning from beyond the Indus captured Harlan’s imagination entirely. He wrote: ‘I had determined to indulge the spirit of adventure that then absorbed my views of life.’ If the British would not return this great man to his throne, then Harlan himself might take a hand in the restoration, perhaps winning power and fame in the process. Europeans had forged their own kingdoms here before, starting with Alexander the Great. The most recent self-made king had been George Thomas, an Irish mercenary who at the end of the previous century, with a combination of guile, good fortune and extreme violence, had carved out a realm east of Delhi and assumed the title of Rajah of Haryana. Here were kingdoms for the making, requiring only enterprise, energy and luck. ‘Every man in his own estimation is a king,’ wrote Harlan, ‘enfeafed in the royal prerogative of divine right, with whom self is the God predominant.’

      Any audience with the exiled king would have to be arranged without alerting the British. Through an intermediary, Harlan sent a secret message to Shujah’s vizier, or chief counsellor, outlining ‘a general proposition affecting the royal prospects of restoration’. The king snapped at the bait, and Harlan was summoned to a private interview in the garden of the royal residence.

      At twilight on the appointed evening, a figure clad in Afghan turban and shalwar kamiz slipped quietly out of Wade’s house and headed in the direction of Shujah’s walled compound. ‘I assumed the disguise of a Cabulee,’ wrote Harlan, ‘although then unaccustomed to the role and unaddicted to the air of a native.’ The British had posted a pair of guards at the gates to Shujah’s residence, ostensibly for his protection but also to spy on visitors, including the numerous local ‘dancers’ attending the king and his court. The soldiers had been bribed in advance, and at a prearranged signal they melted away. ‘The Indian sentries were well trained in the amatory service of His Majesty,’ Harlan remarked wryly. ‘The magic influence of “open sesame” could not have been more effective upon bolts and bars. The portals were thrown open and I approached the small wicket gate that afforded secret egress in a retired part of the wall.’

      On the other side of the gate stood Mullah Shakur, Shujah’s vizier, personal cleric and sometime military commander. ‘The priest was a short fat person,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The rotundity of his figure was adequately finished by the huge turban characteristic of his class, encased in voluminous outline by a profusion of long thick hair which fell upon his shoulders in heavy sable silvered curls.’ There was a reason for the vizier’s elaborate hairdo, for Shakur’s most obvious distinguishing feature was the absence of his ears. These had been cut off on the orders of the king many years earlier, as a punishment for cowardice on the battlefield, and Mullah Shakur had grown his flowing locks to conceal the mutilation.

      Harlan would soon discover that Shujah had an unpleasant penchant for removing the ears, tongues, noses and even the testicles of those of his courtiers who had offended him; and despite his own disfigurement, Mullah Shakur was an enthusiast for this brutal form of chastisement. The result was an ‘earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king’s service’, including one Khwajah Mika, the chief eunuch, an African Muslim in charge of the royal harem. The king had ordered Khwajah to be de-eared during a royal picnic, after the tent protecting the king’s wives from sight had been blown down by a gust of wind. ‘The executioner was of a tender conscience,’ Harlan wrote, and ‘merely deprived Khwajah Mika of the lower part of the organ’. Having already lost his manhood, the African appears to have been philosophical about the additional loss of his lobes, and unlike the mullah he ‘shaved the head and fearlessly displayed the mark of royal favour’.

      Earless and suspicious, Mullah Shakur eyed the American visitor carefully. ‘Having assured himself by carefully scanning my features that I was the person he expected, for my dress entirely concealed the Christian outline, he replied to my salutation in a subdued tone and turning about without another word, led the way into the interior.’

      It was the golden moment just before sunset in India known as the time of hawa khana, ‘breathing the air’, when the cooling earth exhales. What Harlan saw in the dusk light took his breath away: a vast and perfectly tended Oriental garden in full bloom: ‘His Majesty’s tastes and exiled fancies sought gratification in the floral beauties of his native