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

of Oriental horticulture practised in the City of Cabul. This enclosure, which was three hundred yards square, included the fruit trees, the parterres of flowers, the terraced walks and the well irrigated soil incident to the place of his nativity, and thus the king caused to be transplanted a part, at least, of the dominion which he had lost.’ Like many expatriates, Shujah had surrounded himself with memories of home, but he had done so in spectacular style, reproducing the gardens of Kabul’s Bala Hisar fortress, from the harem buildings to the flowerbeds to the pavilions, where he would play chess in the evenings.

      Motioning Harlan to follow, the vizier set off down a cool avenue of lime and orange trees. Many years later, Harlan recalled the delightful sensation of leaving the parched evening heat of India to enter the refreshing shade of a make-believe pleasure garden with blooming flowers, ornamental ponds and fountains, their cool spray shining in the moonlight.

      As they neared a large terrace walled with richly embroidered cloth, the mullah touched Harlan’s shoulder, indicating that he should remain where he was, and slipped inside the enclosure. Household servants and slaves flitted between the trees, observing the newcomer in Afghan robes, who tried to calm his nerves by identifying the different varieties of fruit trees. Silently Mullah Shakur reappeared at Harlan’s elbow, drew him towards the terrace and lifted the flap. Inside, on an elevated banquette, sat Shujah al-Moolk, the exiled king of Afghanistan, enthroned in a vast armchair.

      Harlan snapped off his best military salute. Shujah responded with a courteous nod, a few words of welcome and a sprinkling of light compliments. Harlan had been boning up on Afghan courtly etiquette, and struggled through the fantastically ornate language required when addressing royalty. ‘I replied in bad Hindoostani and worse Persian,’ he conceded, ‘for I was then but a neophyte in the acquisition of Oriental languages.’

      Harlan studied the exiled monarch, a stout and imposing figure in middle age with a thick beard dyed the deepest black. His clothing was expensively simple, a plain white tunic of fine muslin over dark silk pantaloons, but his headgear was priceless: a large velvet cap, scalloped at the edges and adorned in the centre by a large diamond. Harlan was immediately struck by ‘the grace and dignity of His Highness’s demeanour’. Every movement, every word, was freighted with unquestionable authority. The heavy-lidded eyes radiated power and menace, but also sadness: ‘Years of disappointment had created in the countenance of the ex-King an appearance of melancholy and resignation.’ His commands were barked in monosyllables, and his servants, including Mullah Shakur, were plainly terrified of him, loitering in submissive attitudes like dogs waiting to be kicked.

      Courtesies over, in a mixture of languages Harlan made the king an offer. He would travel secretly to Kabul, and link up with Shah Shujah’s allies to organise a rebellion. Meanwhile Shujah should begin raising troops for an assault against Dost Mohammed Khan, the prince who had usurped his crown. Once Harlan had managed to ‘ascertain and organise his partisans’ in Kabul, he proposed to return to Ludhiana and lead the king’s troops in a full-scale invasion. If all went according to plan this would coincide with a mass uprising in Kabul, and Shah Shujah al-Moolk, with Harlan at his side, would return in triumph to the throne of his ancestors. Harlan even offered to provide some of the troops. ‘I engaged to join the royal standard with a thousand retainers,’ he wrote, ‘holding myself responsible for the command of the army and the performance of all duties connected with the military details of an expedition into the kingdom of Kabul.’

      If the king was surprised by this audacious proposition, he was far too clever to show it. His popularity in his homeland, he told Harlan, ‘far preponderated above the present leader in Kabul’, and he listed the powerful supporters who would flock to the royal banner. Indeed, he would have launched such an invasion already, but the British had declined to promise him a safe haven in case of failure, and he was concerned for the safety of the harem, which he could hardly take into battle. If the British government would look after his family, and promise that he could return to Ludhiana if the invasion failed, then he would immediately begin to prepare an expedition. Shujah had not yet recruited a single soldier to his cause, and already he was talking about defeat. This, as Harlan would soon learn, was typical of a man whose arrogance was matched only by his timidity.

      And what, Shujah asked pointedly, did Harlan expect for himself, should this daring plan come to fruition? Harlan’s response was astonishing. In return for restoring Shujah’s crown, this young American adventurer without references, Persian or experience of military command, expected to govern the kingdom, in fact if not in name. If their joint enterprise was successful, Shujah would reign once more in Kabul, but Harlan proposed to rule as his vizier, an Afghan potentate in his own right.

      Even Shah Shujah’s poise appears to have been temporarily undermined by this presumptuous suggestion, and instead of replying directly, the exiled king began extolling the splendours of Kabul, its music, its gardens, its trees laden with luscious fruit. ‘Kabul is called the Crown of the Air,’ he declared. ‘I pray for the possession of those pleasures which my native country alone can afford.’

      Then he fell into a reverie, and for several minutes nothing was said. Finally he fixed his visitor with a beady stare, and spoke: ‘Should success attend your measures, I am ready to relinquish all political power into your hands and claim only for myself the summer and winter residences, with the fruits of Kabul and Kandahar. Heaven grant we may enjoy together the revival of those sweetly varied and luxurious hours which daily haunt my imagination and in unison participate in possession of an inheritance which fate at this moment denies to me.’

      The interview was over. Harlan bowed and backed out of the royal presence. His encounter with this pining potentate had moved him. ‘My feelings warmed into deep sympathy for the exiled monarch and I took leave of His Majesty with the confirmed determination of devoting myself to his service.’ Harlan was elated by the pure romance of his imagined mission, and the opportunity to invent himself as the liberator of a country oppressed by tyranny. Of course he only had Shujah’s word for this, but that was enough: ‘I saw him [as] an exiled and legitimate monarch, the victim of treasonable practices, popular in the regard of his subjects, opposed by a combination of feudal chiefs against the hereditary ruler [they] had driven into banishment.’

      Harlan eventually came to see the Old Pretender in a very different light, and would conclude that ‘In his true colours he was unparalleled in infamous debauchery.’ The mutilated mullah who now led him away was warning enough that he was dealing with a most unpredictable man. Ears or no, Mullah Shakur had been listening intently throughout the interview, and as they walked back down the avenue of fruit trees the scarred old warrior-divine instructed Harlan to begin military preparations while awaiting Shujah’s decision on the timing of his quest. At the wicket gate Harlan bade farewell to the vizier and the two men parted, as Harlan wrote, ‘he to revalue with His Majesty the probabilities of success which my proposals encouraged, and I to devise additional and appropriate measures for the prosecution of castle building’.

      To build castles Harlan needed troops. With impressive hubris he ordered a Ludhiana tailor to sew him an American flag, ran it up a makeshift flagpole on the edge of town and, without any authority to do so, began recruiting an army under the stars and stripes. There were plenty of native mercenaries knocking about the border station looking for work and adventure, and word soon spread that the feringhee was prepared to pay good money for fighting men. Local Europeans were convinced that this peculiar American planned to carve out his own kingdom, as George Thomas had done a generation earlier, an impression he did nothing to dispel. William McGregor, an English doctor posted in Ludhiana, wrote that Harlan ‘started out with the intention of subduing all the countries across the Sutlej’, noting that he had ‘hoisted the American flag at Loodhiana, and collected a rabble’. Joseph Wolff, the wandering missionary, recorded that Harlan had left British India intending ‘to make himself king of Afghanistan’.

      Harlan had little choice but to confide in Captain Wade, and told the Englishman that Shujah had invested him with ‘the powers of a secret agent, in which he was commissioned and stimulated to revolutionize Avghanistan in favor of the “true King”’. Indeed, the British agent, with his wide network of informers, was probably aware of what Harlan was up to from the moment he entered Shujah’s pleasure garden. Wade,