Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

      Now, with the confirming nod of another cousin, that ‘marvellous job’ was his.

      A brief silence filled the Buckingham Palace sitting-room. With it, Louis Mountbatten sensed a shift in his cousin’s mood.

      ‘It’s too bad,’ the King said, a melancholy undertone to his voice, ‘I always wanted to come out to see you in Southeast Asia when you were fighting there, and then go to India, but Winston stopped it. I’d hoped at least to go out to India after the war. Now I’m afraid I shan’t be able to.’

      t’s sad,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been crowned Emperor of India without ever having gone to India and now I shall lose the title from here in this palace in London.’

      Indeed, George VI would die without ever setting foot on that fabulous land. There would never be a tiger hunt for him, no parade of elephants jangling past in silver and gold, no line of bejewelled maharajas bowing to his person.

      His had been the crumbs of the Victorian table, a reign unexpected in its origins, conceived and matured in the shadows of war, now to be accomplished in the austerity of a post-war, Socialist England. On the May morning in 1937 when the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced Prince Albert, Duke of York, George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, 16 million of the 52 million square miles of land surface of the globe had been linked by one tie or another to his crown.

      The central historic achievement of George VI’s reign would be the melancholy task foretold by the presence of his cousin in his sitting-room. He would be remembered by history as the monarch who had reigned over the dismemberment of the British Empire. Crowned King Emperor of an Empire that exceeded the most extravagant designs of Rome, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Caliphs or Napoleon, he would die the sovereign of an island kingdom on its way to becoming just another European nation.

      ‘I know I’ve got to take the “I” out of GRI. I’ve got to give up being King Emperor,’ the monarch noted, ‘but I would be profoundly saddened if all the links with India were severed.’

      George VI knew perfectly well that the great imperial dream had faded. But if it had to disappear, how sad it would be if some of its achievements and glories could not survive it, if what it had represented could not find an expression in some new form more compatible with a modern age.

      ‘It would be a pity,’ he observed, ‘if an independent India were to turn its back on the Commonwealth.’

      The Commonwealth could indeed provide a framework in which George VI’s hopes might be realized. It could become a multi-racial assembly of independent nations with Britain, prima inter pares, at its core. Bound by common traditions, a common past, common symbolic ties to his crown, the Commonwealth could exercise great influence in world affairs. Britain, at the hub of such a body, would still speak in the councils of the world with an echo of that imperial voice that had once been hers. London might still be London; cultural, spiritual, financial and mercantile centre for much of the world. The imperial substance would have disappeared, but a shadow would remain to differentiate George VI’s island kingdom from those other nations across the English Channel.

      If that ideal was to be realized, it was essential India remain within the Commonwealth. If India refused to join, the Afro-Asian nations which in their turn would accede to independence in the years to come would almost certainly follow her example. That would condemn the Commonwealth to become just a grouping of the Empire’s white dominions.

      Influenced by a long anti-imperial tradition however, George VI’s Prime Minister and the Labour Party did not share the King’s inspiration. Attlee had not even told Mountbatten he was to make an effort to keep India in the Commonwealth.

      George VI, as a constitutional monarch, could do virtually nothing to further his hopes. His cousin, however, could and Louis Mountbatten ardently shared the King’s aspirations. No member of the royal family had travelled as extensively in the old Empire as he had. His intellect had understood and accepted its imminent demise; his heart ached at the thought.

      Sitting there in the Buckingham Palace sitting-room, Victoria’s two great-grandsons reached a private decision. Louis Mountbatten would become the agent of their common aspiration for the Commonwealth’s future.

      In a few days, Mountbatten would insist that Attlee include in his terms of reference a specific injunction to maintain an independent India, united or divided, inside the Commonwealth if at all possible. In the weeks ahead, there could be no task to which India’s new Viceroy would devote more thought, more persuasiveness, more cunning than that of maintaining a link between India and his cousin’s crown.

      In a sense, no one might seem more naturally destined to occupy the majestic office of Viceroy of India than Louis Mountbatten. His first public gesture had occurred during his christening when, with a wave of his infant fist, he had knocked the spectacles from the bridge of his great-grandmother’s imperial nose.

      His family’s lineage, with one passage through the female line, went back to the Emperor Charlemagne. He was, or had been, related by blood or marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Ferdinand I of Rumania, Gustav VI of Sweden, Constantine I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway and Alexander I of Yugoslavia. For Louis Mountbatten, the crises of Europe had been family problems.

      Thrones, however, had been in increasingly short supply by the time Mountbatten was eighteen at the end of the First World War. The fourth child of Victoria’s favourite granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, her cousin, had had to savour the royal existence at second hand, playing out the summers of his youth in the palaces of his more favoured cousins. The memories of those idyllic summers remained deeply etched in his memory: tea parties on the lawns of Windsor Castle at which every guest might have worn a crown; cruises on the yacht of the Tsar; rides through the forests around Saint Petersburg with his haemophiliac cousin, the Tsarevitch, and the Tsarevitch’s sister, the Grand Duchess Marie, with whom he fell in love.

      With that background, Mountbatten could have enjoyed a modest income, token service under the crown; the pleasant existence of a handsome embellishment to the ceremonials of a declining caste. He had chosen quite a different course, however, and he stood this winter morning at the pinnacle of a remarkable career.

      Mountbatten had just become 43 when, in the autumn of 1943, Winston Churchill, searching for ‘a young and vigorous mind’, had appointed him Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia. The authority and responsibility that command placed on his youthful shoulders had only one counterpart, the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower. One hundred and twenty-eight million people across a vast sweep of Asia fell under his charge. It was a command which at the time it was formed, he would later recall, had had ‘no victories and no priorities, only terrible morale, a terrible climate, a terrible foe and terrible defeats’.

      Many of his subordinates were twenty years and three or four ranks his senior. Some tended to look on him as a playboy who used his royal connection to slip out of his dinner jacket into a naval uniform and temporarily abandon the dance floor of the Café de Paris for the battlefield.

      He restored his men’s morale with personal tours to the front; asserted his authority over his generals by forcing them to fight through Burma’s terrible monsoon rains; cajoled, bullied and charmed every ounce of supplies he could get from his superiors in London and Washington.

      By 1945, his once disorganized and demoralized command had won the greatest land victory ever wrought over a Japanese Army. Only the dropping of the atomic bomb prevented him from carrying out his grand design, Operation Zipper’, the landing of 250,000 men from ports 2000 miles away on the Malay Peninsula, an amphibious operation surpassed in size only by the Normandy landing.

      As a boy, Mountbatten had chosen a naval officer’s career to emulate his father who had left his native Germany at fourteen and risen to the post of First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Mountbatten had barely begun his studies as a cadet, however, when tragedy shattered his adored father’s career. He was forced to resign by the wave of anti-German