September 20, 2010 • 19 mins
The Koh-i-noor diamond has a long, storied history -- and a reputation for bringing trouble to its (male) owners. In this episode, Katie and Sarah trace the adventures of the infamous diamond, from its Indian origins to its final resting place in Britain.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we
will be talking about the diamond fancy jewelry. So, the
(00:22):
famed kohe Nor diamond is said to bring trouble to
any man who possesses it, but women and gods are
very conveniently exempt from very conveniently, so this diamond has
the longest history of any extent stone. And even if
you don't believe in curses, it has definitely caused its
fair share of trouble, maybe because in its heyday, before
(00:44):
it was cut down a whole bonnet, it was a
hundred and ninety one carrots. It's probably not even on
your scale of understanding diamond size off the charts, and
it's a kingdom maker or a reason to torture one's
own brother, as we will see. But the Culinoor of
Old doesn't really exist anymore since eighteen fifty two. It's
(01:07):
been kind of in retirement, as Sarah said, because that's
when it fell into British hands and was recut into
this symmetrical rock that just didn't quite have the messy
glory of the old one. Yeah. Since then it's been
worn by Queen Victoria and two Queen consorts, avoiding that
tricky no manage that the diamond. But unless you've been
(01:29):
to the Tower of London lately, the last time you
probably thought it was at the Queen Mother's funeral. It
was the central stone on her crown of state and
so it was on top of her coffin. And this
prominent display during the funeral caused a little bit of
a stir because the British claim on the stone is
pretty dodgy at best. They essentially took it from a minor,
(01:52):
from a kid. They took the diamond from a candy
from a baby, Yeah exactly. And so it seems that
even centuries after as stones really wild history has passed,
people are still trying to get their hands on it.
Indian MPs have petitioned for the stone to be returned
to India. An ancient Seak gentleman has tried to get
(02:13):
it back. Even the Taliban made a claim on the
stone back in two thousand one. So we've got to
wonder what is it about the cohy Noor diamond. So
let's start with the diamonds early history. It was likely
found in the silt of the Krishna River of India,
which was a major diamond spot until African mining began
(02:33):
in the eighteen eighties. And the first dated reference to
a diamond that could have been the Coeynore was in
the late twelve hundreds when Aladdin Kalgi invaded the Deccan
Plateau and he came back with loads of treasure, including
this mysterious diamond valued at quote half the daily expense
(02:53):
of the whole world. Again off the charts, i'd say. So,
there's no mention of the stone for about two hundred years,
when suddenly it pops up in the hands of the
famous conqueror Sahiradin Muhammed Babur after he seizes the Sultanate
of Delhi in fix So in kind of a nice
moment in the diamond's history, his son, who Manion, finds
(03:15):
the jewel and presents it to his father as a tribute,
and his father promptly gives it back as a present,
so a little nice exchange there. Still it becomes known
as Babura's diamond for a little bit at least, because
humanion proves to be a weaker ruler than his father.
He's also an opium addict, which never really helps with that,
(03:35):
and he's shortly deposed. He flees to Persia with this
precious stone. He almost loses it in the desert, but
he refuses to make a buck by selling it along
the way, And that's in line with ancient Eastern views
of diamonds. You leave them uncut um or cut to
enhance the natural shape. That's why it was Yeah, and
(03:56):
it's hidden away and never ever ever sold. Yea sometimes
would give it to a temple, but it wasn't something
to flaunt or to sell but ther money. And must
be okay with giving the diamond away as a gift
because once he's settled down in exile, he's looking to
start regaining his power and thinks that maybe giving the
(04:17):
stone to a potential ally would be a good way
to go about that. So at this time it's valued,
it's gone up in value. It's valued at the expenditure
of the whole universe for two and a half days,
so that's a considerable appreciation investment, definitely. But the guy
who gets the stone, Shah Tahamas, only sends it to
(04:38):
another ruler as a gift. Diamonds are useful in matters
of diplomacy, and it disappears from history for a while
until sixteen fifty six, when it pops up again. It's
mentioned by the French traveler Francois Bernier, and he writes
that the Persian vizier had just given quote that celebrated
diamond to Shah Jahan, which maybe you remember from I
(05:01):
Bring a Bell. He's the taj Mahal builder, yeah, and
he seems like exactly the kind of guy who would
have this giant diamond. He's also the great grandson of Babura,
so somehow or another, this diamond gets back into that
family after being given away. But in this case, the
diamond brings bad luck because, as we know, Shah Jahan's
(05:22):
son a Rungsa, pulls a coup and imprisons his father
and eventually even takes his diamond. So this empire begins
to decline with our symmetry destroying diamond thief or rung Zeb,
and by seventeen thirty eight it falls under the Persian
Nadir Shah, who knows if the stone and wants it.
(05:44):
But even after he's secured the surrender of the Moghal
Emperor Mohammed Shah, he still doesn't have the diamond. Where
is there is it? Yeah, he's wondering. He's gotten all
this lute already and the diamond is not in it. Finally,
a Harem woman and betrays the diamond's hiding spot. It's
in the Emperor's turban. So Nader Shaw, being pretty tricky here,
(06:07):
makes a peace deal with the emperor. Essentially, the emperor
will get to keep his throne as the vassal king,
and to cement this deal, they'll exchange their turbans, which
is a custom of the time. So you can just
imagine the emperor being asked to give his turban away
and knowing that diamond is hidden inside. But once Nader
(06:30):
Shaw is in possession of the turban, he promptly takes
it back to his private quarters and unwraps it. And
when he sees the diamond, he cries koey Noor or
mountain of light, and that's how it gets the name
we know today. But once in possession of the diamond,
things really go downhill for Nadir. When he's back in Persia,
(06:50):
he starts to lose his mind and begins to butcher
his people and blind his son. Perhaps there's a diamond
curse ups because he is assassinated in seventeen forty seven
and his bodyguard, Akhmed Khan a Dolli, takes the diamond
and heads to Afghanistan. And this is where we have
(07:11):
sort of the final major stage in our diamond's history. Well,
and we've got two kinds of people. There are people
who hide their valuables away, they keep their priceless jewelry
and safe where it's protected but not really enjoyed, and
there are others who like to show it off. Akhmed
was the latter, and in his twenty five years spent
(07:33):
attacking the Punjab from Afghanistan, he wears this stone on
his tunic as a mark of his importance. That's one
way to bling it out, definitely. But his son Timour
is more of the hide it away type, and when
he inherits the stone, he locks it up in Kabul,
and it's probably, I don't know, he probably had a
(07:54):
good reason for locking up, maybe because he has a
lot of sons who all seem to hate each other's guts.
And so the diamond becomes the central part in the
ongoing battles between all of these sons, and while the
brothers duke it out, this is where the torturing your
brother to reveal the diamond's whereabouts come in. Um their
(08:15):
ongoing multi generational fight with the Punjab starts to take
a turn for the worse. A new Punjab leader emerges,
a one eyed teen named Renjeet Sing and finally, after
every possible combination of brotherly war has been exhausted, one
of the sons, the deposed Shah Shuja, is forced to
(08:36):
negotiate with Renji in order to regain his throne from
his brother and the family diamond is offered as a
reward for aid, and that help is offered and given,
but Shuja is slow with his reward, and finally ren
Jet shows up with six hundred horsemen to claim the stone.
This is the line of Punjab after all, so don't
(08:59):
mess with so. He also loves to show off his
new diamond and wears it on an arm band, which
is apparently the arm band I guess without the diamond
is also in the British Crown jewels today, which might
look a little sad like an empty frame. So as
an old man n Jeet takes a final wife. He
(09:19):
has some others. This one is Ronnie Jindencore, the daughter
of his keeper of the kennel, and they have a son, Delipe,
and less than a year later, in eighteen thirty nine,
n Jeet dies. So this is where our tragic adventure
perhaps begins. Yeah, that's because when Maharaja Runjeet Singh dies,
(09:40):
he leaves behind all of these adult sons and this
infant prince we just mentioned, and a very powerful army.
And this combination proves to be deadly as they run
through a series of claimants to the throne, nobody's quite
cut out for it. All of them get murdered one
by one and the army be comes the law of
(10:00):
the state. So finally, just after his sixth birthday, de
Leppe saying who's that, youngest prince is declared Maharajah with
his mother acting as regent. So he is now the
owner of his father's diamond as well as the leader
of the Punjab, and he has a pretty cushy early life.
He's learning lots of languages, um hunting, falconry. But he
(10:25):
is this child ruler and they never fare very well.
In our podcast that they don't and you can guess
what happens. By eighteen forty five, things are falling apart
that army wants payment, the British are starting to move
in on this independent territory, and the result is the
First Anglo Seek War of eighteen forty five to six,
(10:45):
which ends with a major reduction in territory. The Armies
defeated and de Leep's kingdom is cut in had half,
and that's followed pretty quickly by the Second Anglo Seek
War in eighteen forty eight and nine, in which the
Seeks completely lose this time, so de Leipp no longer
has a kingdom. The British enter Lahore and removed De
(11:07):
Leip Singh to a Christian mission town and launch a
smear campaign on his mother and imprisoned her for years.
So the eleven year old Maharajah is forced to sign
away his title, state property and of course the Coheen
North Stone of his father's which is now coveted by
Queen Victoria. The diamond does get in one little last
(11:29):
adventure here. It's comparatively tame to what it's gone through
up until now, but um it nearly ruins one more person,
and that's this British administrator in India, John Lawrence, and
he's been tasked with taking care of the diamond, getting
it where it needs to go, and he puts it
in a matchbox, and he puts puts that matchbox in
(11:49):
his pocket and promptly forgets about it, which I think
I would be constantly thinking of the giant diamond I
was responsible for in my pocket, But he forgets about it.
When he's asked to provide the diamond, he remembers, oh,
my gosh, I was the last person who had it.
Returns home, talks to his Indian servant, and fortunately this
(12:10):
old fellow has saved what he thought was a lump
of glass from his pocket before he sent the coat
to the cleaner, so narrowly avoid losing this amazing diamond
at the last minute here and it's sent to Europe,
cut down eight one carrots and starts its existence as
a crown jewel. But that's not the end of our
story of the boy Maharajah. He has been adopted by
(12:33):
a colonial surgeon on us since he's been separated from
his mother, and converts to Christianity, and in eighteen fifty
four he's sent to England, where he is a big
hit with Victoria and supposedly she notes that quote those
eyes and those teeth are too beautiful, which we're not
sure if that's a little Victorian crush or something incredibly patronizing,
(12:53):
maybe leaning from the lager, especially since he's a he's
a young teenager at the time. But he lives in London,
in in Yorkshire and he's just your typical English gentleman here.
He hans, he socializes, he plays the country squire and
earns the nickname the Black Prince, and he even becomes
(13:13):
a freemason. So this seems like total assimilation, right, Well,
we can't forget about his mother, Ronnie Jenden core has
he forgotten her? Well, the imprisoned Jenden has since escaped
her British jailers. She disguised herself as a slave girl
and made her way to Nepal to seek asylum, and
(13:35):
Deleppe sees her again finally after thirteen years apart, when
he is allowed to return east for a tiger hunting
trip um and see her, and he gets permission to
bring her back to England because she's no longer seen
as a threat she's older, she's sickly, she's nearly blind,
you know, been in prison for you. Surely she cannot
be fomenting revolution. Well they are wrong about her, because
(13:56):
even though she only lives in England for a short
time after this, before she dies, she starts planting little
seeds of revolt in her son's head, reminding him who
he is, what his position is, who his father was,
and he starts losing that assimilation which the British have
been trying so hard to make complete. And by the
(14:19):
time he returns to India in eighteen sixty four to
bring his mother's body home, he's starting to think seriously
about what he could be. But I don't know. These
these thoughts are kind of sidetracked by his formation of
a family he's got. He gets other things on his
mind pretty quickly. Right. He marries Bomba Mueller, who's part Ethiopian,
part German and the daughter of a slave and a
(14:42):
teacher and a mission school. She's called a real life Cinderella,
and they settle on a Suffolk estate and bring their
children up as royalty. But that you know, that seed
was planted, and it continues to haunt Deleape and He's
also got pressure from a cousin at some point and
a officey of the tenth seek Guru, and that finally
(15:03):
makes Deleape push for his sovereignty. So he starts demanding
that he being reinstated as the Maharaja and that the
British restore Punjab. And in eighteen six he actually tries
to get back to India, and he hasn't been back
since his mother's since returning his mother's body. For this,
he's hoping to to reconvert to the Sikh religion, but
(15:27):
he's arrested along the way. He converts there, and then
he spent the last six years of his life in
Paris trying to get the throne back and getting into
some really bizarre conspiracy stuff. He's working with Russians and
Irish revolutionaries hoping that with this series of distractions and
plots they can invade India through the Khaiber Pass. They
(15:51):
weren't my first choice when I was thinking of people.
He might ally himself. No, definitely not, But again domesticity
combined with ill health settle his ambitions a bit. He
marries his English mistress in eighteen eighty nine and has
two more daughters, and as he approaches death, he reconciles
with Queen Victoria. You know, she did very much like
(16:11):
him once upon a time. She gives him a full
pardon and he dies in Paris and his body is
returned to his estate in England. But there's one little
interesting note here on the body of his mother and
her tomb. So, while researching a book on delete, historian
Peter Bance found this gravestone of Jin done in the
(16:33):
catacombs of an English chapel, and the marker had been
buried in rubble. The catacombs had been in ruins since
the nineteen twenties and the marker had been buried in rubble.
And here she is, though, so something seems wrong. If
de Leipp went back to India with the body of
his mother, why is there a tombstone in England. Well,
(16:54):
law at the time prevented cremations and in England, yes, sorry,
And it took a year for Deleipe to secure passage
for him and his mother's body back to India. So
in the meantime she was interred in England with this
very fine monument. And considering it's just temporary exactly, and
the sadness of this story caught the attention of Charles Dickens,
(17:16):
who wrote of a quote poor woman whose ashes have
been squabbled over. Dickens also made an interesting allusion to
her brief power over the British, and he wrote down
here in a coffin covered with white velvet and studded
with brass and nails, rest the Indian dancing woman whose
strong will and bitter enmity towards England caused Lord Dalazie
(17:37):
to save her when an exile. That she was the
only person our government near feared. And it said that
a man who possesses the coyn Ore will rule the world,
but will suffer for it. So who could say what
would have happened had Ronnie Jindencorp possessed the stone herself.
That's our thought to ponder on, and that brings us
(17:59):
to listen or mail. Our email today is from Austin
who attends Texas Tech University, and he said, as I
was listening to your podcast on the Stars of the
Wild West, I noticed you mentioned Will Rogers being the
loyal Red Raider that I am. I thought I would
clue y'all in on something interesting about Will Will was
(18:22):
the reason that Texas Tech has a school band. He
was the man who gave us the money to travel
to Fort Worth to play for the TCU game. He
said that he wanted them to hear quote what a
real West Texas band sounds like. Ever since, our band
has been known as the Going band from raider Land,
and we even gave Will a statue at the entrance
to our campus. We really liked that one. Thank you,
(18:45):
and if you have cool little notes you'd like to
send us on aspects of our podcast, feel free to
email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We also have a Twitter feed Missed in History and
a Facebook fan page. You can keep out what we're
doing on a day to day basis and see pictures
and stuff. And we've also got a great article if
(19:07):
you're interested in learning a little bit more about diamond thievery,
you can search for how diamond Thieves Work on our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com and be sure to check out
this stuff you Missed in History glass blog on the
how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we
will be talking about the diamond fancy jewelry. So, the
(00:22):
famed kohe Nor diamond is said to bring trouble to
any man who possesses it, but women and gods are
very conveniently exempt from very conveniently, so this diamond has
the longest history of any extent stone. And even if
you don't believe in curses, it has definitely caused its
fair share of trouble, maybe because in its heyday, before
(00:44):
it was cut down a whole bonnet, it was a
hundred and ninety one carrots. It's probably not even on
your scale of understanding diamond size off the charts, and
it's a kingdom maker or a reason to torture one's
own brother, as we will see. But the Culinoor of
Old doesn't really exist anymore since eighteen fifty two. It's
(01:07):
been kind of in retirement, as Sarah said, because that's
when it fell into British hands and was recut into
this symmetrical rock that just didn't quite have the messy
glory of the old one. Yeah. Since then it's been
worn by Queen Victoria and two Queen consorts, avoiding that
tricky no manage that the diamond. But unless you've been
(01:29):
to the Tower of London lately, the last time you
probably thought it was at the Queen Mother's funeral. It
was the central stone on her crown of state and
so it was on top of her coffin. And this
prominent display during the funeral caused a little bit of
a stir because the British claim on the stone is
pretty dodgy at best. They essentially took it from a minor,
(01:52):
from a kid. They took the diamond from a candy
from a baby, Yeah exactly. And so it seems that
even centuries after as stones really wild history has passed,
people are still trying to get their hands on it.
Indian MPs have petitioned for the stone to be returned
to India. An ancient Seak gentleman has tried to get
(02:13):
it back. Even the Taliban made a claim on the
stone back in two thousand one. So we've got to
wonder what is it about the cohy Noor diamond. So
let's start with the diamonds early history. It was likely
found in the silt of the Krishna River of India,
which was a major diamond spot until African mining began
(02:33):
in the eighteen eighties. And the first dated reference to
a diamond that could have been the Coeynore was in
the late twelve hundreds when Aladdin Kalgi invaded the Deccan
Plateau and he came back with loads of treasure, including
this mysterious diamond valued at quote half the daily expense
(02:53):
of the whole world. Again off the charts, i'd say. So,
there's no mention of the stone for about two hundred years,
when suddenly it pops up in the hands of the
famous conqueror Sahiradin Muhammed Babur after he seizes the Sultanate
of Delhi in fix So in kind of a nice
moment in the diamond's history, his son, who Manion, finds
(03:15):
the jewel and presents it to his father as a tribute,
and his father promptly gives it back as a present,
so a little nice exchange there. Still it becomes known
as Babura's diamond for a little bit at least, because
humanion proves to be a weaker ruler than his father.
He's also an opium addict, which never really helps with that,
(03:35):
and he's shortly deposed. He flees to Persia with this
precious stone. He almost loses it in the desert, but
he refuses to make a buck by selling it along
the way, And that's in line with ancient Eastern views
of diamonds. You leave them uncut um or cut to
enhance the natural shape. That's why it was Yeah, and
(03:56):
it's hidden away and never ever ever sold. Yea sometimes
would give it to a temple, but it wasn't something
to flaunt or to sell but ther money. And must
be okay with giving the diamond away as a gift
because once he's settled down in exile, he's looking to
start regaining his power and thinks that maybe giving the
(04:17):
stone to a potential ally would be a good way
to go about that. So at this time it's valued,
it's gone up in value. It's valued at the expenditure
of the whole universe for two and a half days,
so that's a considerable appreciation investment, definitely. But the guy
who gets the stone, Shah Tahamas, only sends it to
(04:38):
another ruler as a gift. Diamonds are useful in matters
of diplomacy, and it disappears from history for a while
until sixteen fifty six, when it pops up again. It's
mentioned by the French traveler Francois Bernier, and he writes
that the Persian vizier had just given quote that celebrated
diamond to Shah Jahan, which maybe you remember from I
(05:01):
Bring a Bell. He's the taj Mahal builder, yeah, and
he seems like exactly the kind of guy who would
have this giant diamond. He's also the great grandson of Babura,
so somehow or another, this diamond gets back into that
family after being given away. But in this case, the
diamond brings bad luck because, as we know, Shah Jahan's
(05:22):
son a Rungsa, pulls a coup and imprisons his father
and eventually even takes his diamond. So this empire begins
to decline with our symmetry destroying diamond thief or rung Zeb,
and by seventeen thirty eight it falls under the Persian
Nadir Shah, who knows if the stone and wants it.
(05:44):
But even after he's secured the surrender of the Moghal
Emperor Mohammed Shah, he still doesn't have the diamond. Where
is there is it? Yeah, he's wondering. He's gotten all
this lute already and the diamond is not in it. Finally,
a Harem woman and betrays the diamond's hiding spot. It's
in the Emperor's turban. So Nader Shaw, being pretty tricky here,
(06:07):
makes a peace deal with the emperor. Essentially, the emperor
will get to keep his throne as the vassal king,
and to cement this deal, they'll exchange their turbans, which
is a custom of the time. So you can just
imagine the emperor being asked to give his turban away
and knowing that diamond is hidden inside. But once Nader
(06:30):
Shaw is in possession of the turban, he promptly takes
it back to his private quarters and unwraps it. And
when he sees the diamond, he cries koey Noor or
mountain of light, and that's how it gets the name
we know today. But once in possession of the diamond,
things really go downhill for Nadir. When he's back in Persia,
(06:50):
he starts to lose his mind and begins to butcher
his people and blind his son. Perhaps there's a diamond
curse ups because he is assassinated in seventeen forty seven
and his bodyguard, Akhmed Khan a Dolli, takes the diamond
and heads to Afghanistan. And this is where we have
(07:11):
sort of the final major stage in our diamond's history. Well,
and we've got two kinds of people. There are people
who hide their valuables away, they keep their priceless jewelry
and safe where it's protected but not really enjoyed, and
there are others who like to show it off. Akhmed
was the latter, and in his twenty five years spent
(07:33):
attacking the Punjab from Afghanistan, he wears this stone on
his tunic as a mark of his importance. That's one
way to bling it out, definitely. But his son Timour
is more of the hide it away type, and when
he inherits the stone, he locks it up in Kabul,
and it's probably, I don't know, he probably had a
(07:54):
good reason for locking up, maybe because he has a
lot of sons who all seem to hate each other's guts.
And so the diamond becomes the central part in the
ongoing battles between all of these sons, and while the
brothers duke it out, this is where the torturing your
brother to reveal the diamond's whereabouts come in. Um their
(08:15):
ongoing multi generational fight with the Punjab starts to take
a turn for the worse. A new Punjab leader emerges,
a one eyed teen named Renjeet Sing and finally, after
every possible combination of brotherly war has been exhausted, one
of the sons, the deposed Shah Shuja, is forced to
(08:36):
negotiate with Renji in order to regain his throne from
his brother and the family diamond is offered as a
reward for aid, and that help is offered and given,
but Shuja is slow with his reward, and finally ren
Jet shows up with six hundred horsemen to claim the stone.
This is the line of Punjab after all, so don't
(08:59):
mess with so. He also loves to show off his
new diamond and wears it on an arm band, which
is apparently the arm band I guess without the diamond
is also in the British Crown jewels today, which might
look a little sad like an empty frame. So as
an old man n Jeet takes a final wife. He
(09:19):
has some others. This one is Ronnie Jindencore, the daughter
of his keeper of the kennel, and they have a son, Delipe,
and less than a year later, in eighteen thirty nine,
n Jeet dies. So this is where our tragic adventure
perhaps begins. Yeah, that's because when Maharaja Runjeet Singh dies,
(09:40):
he leaves behind all of these adult sons and this
infant prince we just mentioned, and a very powerful army.
And this combination proves to be deadly as they run
through a series of claimants to the throne, nobody's quite
cut out for it. All of them get murdered one
by one and the army be comes the law of
(10:00):
the state. So finally, just after his sixth birthday, de
Leppe saying who's that, youngest prince is declared Maharajah with
his mother acting as regent. So he is now the
owner of his father's diamond as well as the leader
of the Punjab, and he has a pretty cushy early life.
He's learning lots of languages, um hunting, falconry. But he
(10:25):
is this child ruler and they never fare very well.
In our podcast that they don't and you can guess
what happens. By eighteen forty five, things are falling apart
that army wants payment, the British are starting to move
in on this independent territory, and the result is the
First Anglo Seek War of eighteen forty five to six,
(10:45):
which ends with a major reduction in territory. The Armies
defeated and de Leep's kingdom is cut in had half,
and that's followed pretty quickly by the Second Anglo Seek
War in eighteen forty eight and nine, in which the
Seeks completely lose this time, so de Leipp no longer
has a kingdom. The British enter Lahore and removed De
(11:07):
Leip Singh to a Christian mission town and launch a
smear campaign on his mother and imprisoned her for years.
So the eleven year old Maharajah is forced to sign
away his title, state property and of course the Coheen
North Stone of his father's which is now coveted by
Queen Victoria. The diamond does get in one little last
(11:29):
adventure here. It's comparatively tame to what it's gone through
up until now, but um it nearly ruins one more person,
and that's this British administrator in India, John Lawrence, and
he's been tasked with taking care of the diamond, getting
it where it needs to go, and he puts it
in a matchbox, and he puts puts that matchbox in
(11:49):
his pocket and promptly forgets about it, which I think
I would be constantly thinking of the giant diamond I
was responsible for in my pocket, But he forgets about it.
When he's asked to provide the diamond, he remembers, oh,
my gosh, I was the last person who had it.
Returns home, talks to his Indian servant, and fortunately this
(12:10):
old fellow has saved what he thought was a lump
of glass from his pocket before he sent the coat
to the cleaner, so narrowly avoid losing this amazing diamond
at the last minute here and it's sent to Europe,
cut down eight one carrots and starts its existence as
a crown jewel. But that's not the end of our
story of the boy Maharajah. He has been adopted by
(12:33):
a colonial surgeon on us since he's been separated from
his mother, and converts to Christianity, and in eighteen fifty
four he's sent to England, where he is a big
hit with Victoria and supposedly she notes that quote those
eyes and those teeth are too beautiful, which we're not
sure if that's a little Victorian crush or something incredibly patronizing,
(12:53):
maybe leaning from the lager, especially since he's a he's
a young teenager at the time. But he lives in London,
in in Yorkshire and he's just your typical English gentleman here.
He hans, he socializes, he plays the country squire and
earns the nickname the Black Prince, and he even becomes
(13:13):
a freemason. So this seems like total assimilation, right, Well,
we can't forget about his mother, Ronnie Jenden core has
he forgotten her? Well, the imprisoned Jenden has since escaped
her British jailers. She disguised herself as a slave girl
and made her way to Nepal to seek asylum, and
(13:35):
Deleppe sees her again finally after thirteen years apart, when
he is allowed to return east for a tiger hunting
trip um and see her, and he gets permission to
bring her back to England because she's no longer seen
as a threat she's older, she's sickly, she's nearly blind,
you know, been in prison for you. Surely she cannot
be fomenting revolution. Well they are wrong about her, because
(13:56):
even though she only lives in England for a short
time after this, before she dies, she starts planting little
seeds of revolt in her son's head, reminding him who
he is, what his position is, who his father was,
and he starts losing that assimilation which the British have
been trying so hard to make complete. And by the
(14:19):
time he returns to India in eighteen sixty four to
bring his mother's body home, he's starting to think seriously
about what he could be. But I don't know. These
these thoughts are kind of sidetracked by his formation of
a family he's got. He gets other things on his
mind pretty quickly. Right. He marries Bomba Mueller, who's part Ethiopian,
part German and the daughter of a slave and a
(14:42):
teacher and a mission school. She's called a real life Cinderella,
and they settle on a Suffolk estate and bring their
children up as royalty. But that you know, that seed
was planted, and it continues to haunt Deleape and He's
also got pressure from a cousin at some point and
a officey of the tenth seek Guru, and that finally
(15:03):
makes Deleape push for his sovereignty. So he starts demanding
that he being reinstated as the Maharaja and that the
British restore Punjab. And in eighteen six he actually tries
to get back to India, and he hasn't been back
since his mother's since returning his mother's body. For this,
he's hoping to to reconvert to the Sikh religion, but
(15:27):
he's arrested along the way. He converts there, and then
he spent the last six years of his life in
Paris trying to get the throne back and getting into
some really bizarre conspiracy stuff. He's working with Russians and
Irish revolutionaries hoping that with this series of distractions and
plots they can invade India through the Khaiber Pass. They
(15:51):
weren't my first choice when I was thinking of people.
He might ally himself. No, definitely not, But again domesticity
combined with ill health settle his ambitions a bit. He
marries his English mistress in eighteen eighty nine and has
two more daughters, and as he approaches death, he reconciles
with Queen Victoria. You know, she did very much like
(16:11):
him once upon a time. She gives him a full
pardon and he dies in Paris and his body is
returned to his estate in England. But there's one little
interesting note here on the body of his mother and
her tomb. So, while researching a book on delete, historian
Peter Bance found this gravestone of Jin done in the
(16:33):
catacombs of an English chapel, and the marker had been
buried in rubble. The catacombs had been in ruins since
the nineteen twenties and the marker had been buried in rubble.
And here she is, though, so something seems wrong. If
de Leipp went back to India with the body of
his mother, why is there a tombstone in England. Well,
(16:54):
law at the time prevented cremations and in England, yes, sorry,
And it took a year for Deleipe to secure passage
for him and his mother's body back to India. So
in the meantime she was interred in England with this
very fine monument. And considering it's just temporary exactly, and
the sadness of this story caught the attention of Charles Dickens,
(17:16):
who wrote of a quote poor woman whose ashes have
been squabbled over. Dickens also made an interesting allusion to
her brief power over the British, and he wrote down
here in a coffin covered with white velvet and studded
with brass and nails, rest the Indian dancing woman whose
strong will and bitter enmity towards England caused Lord Dalazie
(17:37):
to save her when an exile. That she was the
only person our government near feared. And it said that
a man who possesses the coyn Ore will rule the world,
but will suffer for it. So who could say what
would have happened had Ronnie Jindencorp possessed the stone herself.
That's our thought to ponder on, and that brings us
(17:59):
to listen or mail. Our email today is from Austin
who attends Texas Tech University, and he said, as I
was listening to your podcast on the Stars of the
Wild West, I noticed you mentioned Will Rogers being the
loyal Red Raider that I am. I thought I would
clue y'all in on something interesting about Will Will was
(18:22):
the reason that Texas Tech has a school band. He
was the man who gave us the money to travel
to Fort Worth to play for the TCU game. He
said that he wanted them to hear quote what a
real West Texas band sounds like. Ever since, our band
has been known as the Going band from raider Land,
and we even gave Will a statue at the entrance
to our campus. We really liked that one. Thank you,
(18:45):
and if you have cool little notes you'd like to
send us on aspects of our podcast, feel free to
email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We also have a Twitter feed Missed in History and
a Facebook fan page. You can keep out what we're
doing on a day to day basis and see pictures
and stuff. And we've also got a great article if
(19:07):
you're interested in learning a little bit more about diamond thievery,
you can search for how diamond Thieves Work on our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com and be sure to check out
this stuff you Missed in History glass blog on the
how stuff works dot com home page
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.