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

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      They changed the course of India’s history. The threat the Moslems had been uttering for years, their warnings of a cataclysm which would overtake India if they were denied their own state, took on a terrifying reality. Suddenly, India was confronted by the awful vision that had sickened Gandhi and sent him into the jungles of Noakhali: civil war.

      To another man, to the cold and brilliant lawyer who had been Gandhi’s chief Moslem foe for a quarter of a century, that prospect now became the tool with which to pry India apart. History, beyond that written by his own people, would never accord Mohammed Ali Jinnah the high place his achievements merited. Yet, it was he, more than Gandhi or anyone else, who held the key to India’s future. It was with that stern and uncompromising Moslem Messiah, leading his people to another man’s Promised Land, that Queen Victoria’s great-grandson would have to contend when he reached India.

      In a tent outside Bombay in August 1946, he had evaluated for his followers in the Moslem League the meaning of Direct Action Day. If Congress wanted war, he declared, then India’s Moslems would ‘accept their offer unhesitatingly’.

      Pale lips pressed into a grim smile, his piercing eyes alight with repressed passion, Jinnah had that day flung down the gauntlet to Congress, to the British.

      ‘We shall have India divided,’ he vowed, ‘or we shall have India destroyed.’

      

^* The Moslems had also been subtly penalized in the two or three decades after 1857 for the role their community had played in the Indian Army Mutiny.

THREE

       ‘Leave India to God’

       London, January 1947

      ‘Look,’ said Louis Mountbatten, ‘a terrible thing has happened.’

      Two men were alone in the intimacy of a Buckingham Palace sitting-room. At times like this, there was never any formality between them. They sat side by side like a couple of old school friends chatting as they sipped their tea. Today, however, a special nuance enlivened Mountbatten’s conversational tone. His cousin King George VI represented his court of last appeal, the last faint hope that he might somehow avoid the stigma of becoming the man to cut Britain’s ties with India. The King was after all Emperor of India and entitled to the final word on his appointment as Viceroy. It was not to be the word the young admiral wished to hear.

      ‘I know,’ replied the King with his shy smile, ‘the Prime Minister’s already been to see me and I’ve agreed.’

      ‘You’ve agreed?’ asked Mountbatten. ‘Have you really thought it over?’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ replied the King quite cheerfully. ‘I’ve thought it over carefully.’

      ‘Look,’ said Mountbatten. ‘This is very dangerous. Nobody can foresee any way of finding an agreement out there. It’s almost impossible to find one. I’m your cousin. If I go out there and make the most deplorable mess, it will reflect very badly on you.’

      ‘Ah,’ said the sovereign, ‘but think how well it will reflect on the monarchy if you succeed.’

      ‘Well,’ sighed Mountbatten, sinking back into his chair, ‘that’s very optimistic of you.’

      He could never sit there in that little salon without remembering another figure who used to sit in the chair across from his, another cousin, his closest friend, who had stood beside him on his wedding day at St Margaret’s, Westminster, the man who should have been King, David, Prince of Wales. From early boyhood, they had been close. When in 1936, as Edward VIII, David had abdicated the throne for which he had been trained because he was not prepared to rule without the woman he loved, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten had haunted the corridors of his palace, the King’s constant solace and companion.

      How ironic, Mountbatten thought. It was as David’s ADC that he had first set foot on the land he was now to liberate. It was 17 November 1921. India, the young Mountbatten had noted in his diary that night, ‘is the country one had always heard about, dreamt about, read about.’ Nothing on that extraordinary royal tour would disappoint his youthful expectations. The Raj was at its zenith then, and no attention was too lavish, no occasion too grand for the heir to the imperial throne, the Shahzada Sahib, and his party. They travelled in the white and gold viceregal train, their journey a round of parades, polo games, tiger hunts, moonlit rides on elephants, banquets and receptions of unsurpassed elegance proffered by the crown’s staunchest allies, the Indian princes. Leaving, Mountbatten thought, ‘India is the most marvellous country and the Viceroy has the most marvellous job in the world.’

      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.’

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