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This micromanaging puritan tried to limit sensuality, banning women from wearing tight trousers and in Kashmir ordering people to wear drawers instead of nothing. As his court became more rigorous and orderly, he lectured his son Azzam, ‘Fear the sighs of the oppressed,’ and warned his vizier, ‘Oppression will cause darkness on Judgement Day.’ Alamgir was probably the hardest-working ruler in Indian history, barely sleeping, poring over his paperwork: ‘I was sent into the world by providence to live and labour, not for myself but for others.’ Often reflecting on power, he was a Machiavellian – ‘One can’t rule without deception’ – and violence.^* ‘The greatest conquerors,’ he claimed, ‘aren’t the greatest kings,’ but this scion of Tamerlane lived for conquest: ‘When you have an enemy to destroy, spare nothing, anything is permissible … that can deliver success.’

For all his talk of justice, Alamgir restored dominion over Punjab by executing the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur, crushed Afghan resistance, then devoted his reign to conquest of the south, where his ambitions collided with those of a charismatic Hindu warrior.

In 1660, Alamgir sent an army to destroy a descendant of one of Ambar’s generals, a Hindu warlord named Shivaji, who based at Pune rebelled against the sultan of Bijapur and started to craft a kingdom in the Deccan. In 1659, at a meeting with a Bijapuri general, Shivaji used a tiger claw in his sleeve to eviscerate his opponent, then smashed his army. He stressed that the Mughals were Turkish foreigners. Instead he aspired to create a Hindavi swarajya – a Hindu Indian kingdom. When he routed Alamgir’s armies, the emperor invited him to court, hoping to co-opt him and his son Sambhaji with the traditional blandishments, only to humiliate then imprison the proud Marathas. While he debated whether to kill Shivaji or appoint him governor of Kabul, the Tiger of Deccan was daily sending out baskets of sweets for the poor. One day he and his son escaped in their sweet baskets and returned to Deccan to conquer their own empire.

Soon after Alamgir seized the world, the century’s greatest English ruler fell ill.

QUEEN DICK

In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell, now fifty-nine and poleaxed by the agonizing death from cancer of his favourite daughter Betty, took to his bed suffering blood poisoning from a kidney infection. His generals planned the succession around his deathbed.

In March 1657, the Speaker of the House had again offered Oliver the crown. His eldest son Dick, who would succeeded to the crown, was uncertain. But the younger son Henry, lord lieutenant of Ireland, good-looking and competent, regarded it as ‘a gaudy feather in the hat of authority’. Cromwell chain-smoked as he mulled over the idea, which he too called ‘this feather in a cap’. He decided to accept it – until he took a walk in St James’s Park and encountered three of his republican generals who told him they would resign if he did. ‘I can’t undertake this government with that title of king,’ Oliver told Parliament. ‘God hath blasted this title.’ Instead, in June, he was invested with a quasi-royal panoply, a procession with the sword of state, borne by Warwick, and a sceptre, riding through London with his eldest son Dick by his side. When he fell ill, he prevaricated about naming his successor.^*

‘Tell me, is it possible to fall from grace?’ he asked those around him, adding the certainty: ‘Faith is the covenant, the only support.’ As he sank into a coma, the generals asked him to name his successor: Dick? ‘Yes,’ he whispered, rallying in the morning to tell his children, ‘Go on cheerfully,’ before meeting his maker.

Dick, thirty-one years old, was at the bedside along with the Protector’s son-in-law General Charles Fleetwood and brother-in-law John Desborough, who represented the army. Henry Cromwell held Ireland. That evening the council visited Dick and appointed him head of state. Dick genially accepted. ‘The Most Serene and Renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector, having in his lifetime declared and appointed the most noble and illustrious Lord Richard, eldest son of his said late Highness, to succeed him in the government of this nation,’ the Cromwellians on 9 September 1658 declared him the rightful Protector. Charles II, watching from Holland, despaired that he would ever return. But Dick, unvarnished by charisma, unguided by experience, unblessed by providence, lacked authority.