Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond

by William Dalrymple

Though the loss of Robert Peel was keenly felt by both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the royal couple had an ambitious project on the horizon which helped to pull them out from their sadness. ‘The Great Exhibition’, or to give its full title, ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’, was to be the greatest show on earth, and it was to take place in London, the heart of Victoria’s empire. It had helped that Peel himself had been a champion of the Great Exhibition. He had devoted months of his time and expertise to the event, and had been at a planning meeting on the very day he was fatally thrown from his horse. Victoria and Albert were determined that his efforts should not have been in vain. The Great Exhibition was to be a showcase for the very best examples of culture, industry and beauty. Albert had been instrumental at every stage, coaxing and cajoling his way through British bureaucracy to drag the project from the page to Hyde Park. The couple hoped the exhibition’s success might increase his popularity. When Albert married Queen Victoria in 1839, it had not been a popular match. Victoria’s subjects deemed him to be beneath her, a minor royal from an impoverished and undistinguished state, barely larger than a small English county.2 Parliament also treated him with condescension, reducing his allowance from 50,000 pounds, the usual granted to a sovereign’s spouse, to 30,000 pounds, and vetoing the queen’s wish to give him the title of ‘Prin...