Cromwell was now tempted to join the puritans of Warwick’s Connecticut. Instead his life stabilized when he inherited property in England from a cousin. But a wider instability was developing. In 1637, King Charles’s religious innovations ignited a Scottish revolution when he imposed his new prayer book. The Scots signed a Covenant to resist. The king tried to repress them by force. An aesthete whom Rubens called ‘the greatest student of art’, Charles was no soldier, and his forces were defeated by the Scots whose success, coinciding with raging religious war in Europe, inspired opposition to his taxes in England. Warwick and his coterie of other lords and MPs were now convinced that Charles was an ungodly tyrant in cahoots with his Catholic wife. Warwick personally reprimanded Charles for his taxes. To pay for the Scottish war Charles now had to call Parliament, but he also appointed a dynamic enforcer, his lord lieutenant of Ireland, the earl of Strafford. The accelerating spiral of fear and hatred spun both sides towards violence. Warwick and his allies were encouraging a Scottish invasion, Strafford planning to import an Irish army. If Parliament did not destroy Strafford, he would destroy Parliament: in April 1641, MPs passed a bill of attainder, effectively convicting him of treason. In May, a righteous killing and a Protestant wedding showed the way things were going: meagre crowds celebrated the marriage of Charles’s nine-year-old daughter Mary to the Dutch prince of Orange, aged twelve, but thousands enjoyed the beheading of Strafford. In October 1641, the already heightened tension was redoubled by a Catholic rebellion in Ireland in which English Protestants were murdered. The parliamentarians believed Charles had fomented the rebellion and dared not give him an army to suppress the Irish lest he use it on them. Irish strife poisoned London politics: both sides now feared that this was a struggle for survival in which one side would destroy the other.
In December, the opposition successfully proposed a Grand Remonstrance against Charles calling for the reform of Church and state. In the House, Cromwell, now forty-one, whispered to his neighbour that had it failed to pass, he would have gone to America: ‘I’d have sold all I had the next morning and never seen England more.’ The committees of Parliament now seized much of government. On 4 January 1642, Charles and his guards entered the Commons and tried to arrest five MPs,* but they had fled and he was jostled by hostile crowds. A week later he left London and at Nottingham he raised his standard: it was war.
As England became a failed state, Shahjahan was taking Mughal India to its zenith.
Nurjahan had weaned Jahangir off the opium but it was too late: the padishah had lost control, humiliatingly taken prisoner by a mutinous general, though he was almost liberated by Nurjahan leading a rescue mission on an elephant. On Jahangir’s death,* Emperor Shahjahan ordered his vizier Asafkhan, Nurjahan’s brother and Mumtaz’s father, to kill his brother, two nephews and two cousins. As the son succeeded the father as padishah, the niece succeeded her aunt as empress.
Shahjahan was passionately in love with Mumtaz, whom he entitled Malika-i-Jahan – Queen of the World. ‘His entire delight,’ wrote his court historian, ‘was centred on this illustrious lady to the extent that he didn’t feel for his others one-thousandth of the love he had for her.’ She spent most of their nineteen-year marriage pregnant, bearing a child every sixteen months. Four boys and three girls survived.
It should have been a recipe for respect and loyalty. Instead power beat family: all seven, even the girls, would throw themselves into a gory tournament of power. Their first daughter, Jahanara, was the father’s favourite; the eldest boy, Darashikoh, was the heir, but the third, Aurangzeb, showed the necessary killer instinct: when he was charged by an elephant as a teenager, during an elephant fight, he coolly held his horse steady and waited, spear at the ready.
No one could play the emperor like Shahjahan, brought up not by his Rajput mother but by Akbar and Ruqaiya. While Akbar was portrayed in court art taking part in athletic hunts and Jahangir as a sensitive prince, Shahjahan cast himself as quasi-divine, messiah-like, the ‘second Lord of the Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus’, alongside Tamerlane the first Lord.
Mumtaz was his partner in all this, granted an unprecedented million-rupee allowance and given the imperial seal to enable her to check all documents. She always accompanied him, whether in war or peace.
