705. Queen Victoria’s Revenge: The Mad Emperor of Abyssinia (Part 1)

At Suez, one of our Navy's loops will take you down the Red Sea. They'll have you at Zoola, that's the port for Abbasinia, by the middle of February. And it can't take above a week to get the silver upcountry to this place called Atagrat. That's where General Napier will be. Napier? Not Bob the Bug Hunter. What the blazes is he doing in Abbasinia? We haven't got a station there. Aha, we have by now you may be sure. He was laughing and disbelief. You mean to tell me you haven't heard? Why he's invaded the place? With an army, from India. The silver is to help fund his campaign don't you see? Good God Flashy, where have you been? Held up. Held up, can't you? Why is he invading? To rescue the captives. Our consul, envoys, missionaries. They held prisoner by this mad cannibal king. And he's chaining him and flogging him and kicking up no end of a row. Teodros' name is. And you mean to say you've not heard of him? I'll be damned. Why? There's been our braw in parliament. Our greatest queen right in letters. A penny or more on the income tax? It's true. So that is from a memoir by one of Victorian Britain's most decorated officers. General Sahari Flashman V.C. Recalling his part in what he, in his memoir, calls "The Strangest Campaign" in the history of British arms. And this is the subject of today's episode. And our next episode, the Abbasinian expedition of 1868. And I think it's fair to say that this isn't an expedition that is particularly well-known, not one of the kind of the classic Victorian expeditions, but it is a banger. And if you go to pretty much any of Britain's leading museums, so the British Museum, the British Library, the V&A, the Bodleian, you will find manuscripts or relics or jewels or treasures that were brought back to Britain from this expedition. And Dominic, we get complaints sometimes, don't we, from Canadian listeners, that we don't have enough mentions of Canada on this podcast. But I gather that some of this loot even found its way to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. So that's a lovely little nod to our Canadian listener Mark Arnie there, because I know he's a big fan of the rest of his history, and he will enjoy that at that moment. So yeah, those treasures carried off by British troops after they stormed the mountain citadel of Magdalor to rescue almost 60 European hostages. This Emperor, Theodore, Towardros, the second was holding. And as you say, it's not a terribly well-known Victorian escapade, but it is surely the maddest. So in Sahari Flashman's memoirs, he recalls, and I quote, "The screaming charge of long-haired warriors swing their hideous sickle blades against the Sikh bayonets, the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamji, the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, who doesn't love a ghastly forest of crucifixes." Right, exactly. Above all, he recalls, and I quote, "The transformation of an urbane cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant, shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims." I mean, I don't want to reign on the parade, but obviously this is from a novel. Flashman isn't real, he's an invented character by George McDonald Fraser for the avoidance of any doubt. But how much of this exaggerated, how much is true, do we think? A little bit of it is exaggerated, but there's an awful lot of truth in this. So, among the war correspondents who were embedded with the British troops, the British expedition that went to Magdala, Womens Henry Morton Stanley, and another was the future imperial novelist, G.A. Henty. Henty said, "This was an expedition to rank alongside the adventures of Enancor Tez and Francisco Pizarro," which we've done on the show. And he's not wrong. Do you think this inspired him in his novels? Because as I remember, I read some of them. They were always kind of with clive to Calcutta, with Hannibal across the Alps or that kind of stuff. And it always involved a journey. Yes, completely. Like King Solomon's minds or something. The late Victorians and Edwardians, they love a journey, they love a quest and an expedition. And I think the fact that Henty had been on this incredible, you know, this incredible odyssey into the highlands of Abyssinia from the Red Sea coast, undoubtedly informed his writing. And there is something terribly tragic about this story, but something really thrilling about it as well. And Abyssinia is Ethiopia. And Ethiopia famously is the country in Africa that was never colonized. Yeah, exactly. But interesting that the British do get there even so. Exactly. So, and Tom, you will know this better than anybody. Well, anybody outside Ethiopia. It's also the second oldest Christian country in the world, isn't it, after Armenia? So, I think in Brace Christianity in 330 AD, when Band-Aid asked, do they know it's Christmas? Yeah, they absolutely do. Absolutely, they have done for much longer than we have. But after that, just to give people a sense. So, Abyssinia was called in the 19th century. It became effectively cut off from sort of the Mediterranean and the world that became Christendom. And so, it became shrouded in mystery. And people in medieval Europe used to love the idea of Prestor John, didn't they? This kind of lost Christian king who might be in India or he might be in somewhere in Africa. And people have often wondered whether this was some sort of buried ancestral memory of this lost Christian realm of Abyssinia. Anyway, in the 1520s, the Portuguese turned up as always, the Portuguese. And then for the next few centuries, very slowly the outside world intrudes on this kind of mountain kingdom. So, they have the Ottomans who are on the Red Sea. And then the early 19th century, the Egyptians, so the Egyptians are sort of pushing up the Nile through Sudan. And both of these powers are Muslim. And Ethiopia, obviously, is Christian. So, that's adding a further dimension of tension. Exactly. So, there's a strain of nativism that runs through this story, I think, of nationalism, I suppose. And a fear of encirclements by Muslim powers. And a fear that other Christians, heretical Christians, will sell them out. Well, we did an episode on the Ark of the Covenant, which Ethiopia claims to have. And the Ethiopian royal family claimed a cent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. So, they have very, very deep links to the kind of the mythology of the Bible in a way that no other Christian kingdom does. Exactly. And they feel, well, they feel they own the story. And the other people are newcomers and parviners and so on. Anyway, let's kick off in 1843. So, 1843, this young British visitor arrives in Abyssinian. His name is Walter Plowden and he's 23 years old. Plowden was born in India to a civil service family. But he's a kind of restless, adventurous sort of young man. He's eager to see action. And he was going back to England when he stopped in Suez. And he met a Scottish sailor called John Bell. John Bell said to him, you know, I've always had the stream of going to look for the source of the white Nile. And Plowden said, brilliant, why don't we do it? I'll come along. Yeah, because that's a peak Victorian activity. It is. So, they're set off. They went south, they went into the mountains of Abyssinia and they absolutely loved it. And this guy Plowden, he wrote about it afterwards, he said it's absolutely brilliant. It's basically like going back in time to the high middle ages. It's warlords, it's feasts, it's battles, it's chivalry. He says, you know, life in Britain and in Western Europe now it's very boring and industrial and suburban. But this, this is fantastic. There is no parallel to it, he said, in this steaming and telegraphing world. Well, the steam and the steamship and the telegrapher and the railway are things we'll be talking about in a little while. So they went into Abyssinia, Bell married an Abyssinian woman and became a kind of military officer in Abyssinia. And Plowden had all kinds of mad adventures and escapades and captures and escapes. And eventually he decided to go back to England inevitably he was shipwrecked in the Red Sea. But finally he got back and in 1848 he was appointed by the foreign office as Britain's first consul at a place called Masawa, which is a Red Sea port. It's now an Eritrea and Masawa was basically the gateway from the sea into this landlocked kingdom of Abyssinia. And Plowden's great dream, he's a huge, I don't know if this is a word, Abyssinia file. And his dream is to arrange a permanent treaty that will cement Anglo Abyssinian friendship. The problem is that Abyssinia is very turbulent. It's basically locked into this permanent wars of the roses. So you were already mentioned, there's an ancient dynasty that is descended from Solomon and therefore from David. But they have basically become powerless. And it's a huge infighting between warlords and pretenders and king makers and different kind of provincial strongmen and whatnot impossible to follow. And perhaps as a result, as a reaction to this instability, there is a tradition in Abyssinia by the 19th century that a Messiah descended from Solomon and David. David, or one day arrives he will crush all his rivals, he will unite this fractured country. He will wipe the floor with their enemies the Egyptians and he will march all the way to Jerusalem to restore the true faith in the Holy City. And tradition has it that his name will be Teodros, Theodore, the gift of God. And there are occasionally kind of false Theodros, false Theodros' but none of them kind of stick. And then in March 1855, Ploughton sends a message to the foreign office in London. He says that there is at last some chance that Abbasinia may be united under one sovereign and such a one as she'll merit the support and friendship of her Majesty's government. And the bloke he's talking about is a man called Kasa, who's from the north of Abbasinia. And what we know of this guy Kasa, he was born in 1818 or thereabouts. So he's probably in his mid 30s at this point. He has an obscure background. He seems to have been educated in a monastery, which was attacked by bandits and then he escaped. He became an outlaw himself, a kind of bandit leader, but no hint, no hint that he's descended from a biblical king. No, at this point, no hint that he's descended from Solomon. Although, of course, he will claim descent from Solomon later. Of course. So Kasa is a sort of bold, courageous charismatic man. He's obviously a good leader of men. He beats one rival after another in the 1840s, early 1850s. Then in January 1855, he beats his last major rival. And he assembles all his troops. And he says, I've won. I'm the new emperor of Abbasinia. And to mark the occasion, I am taking a new name and that name is Teodros. So he is Teodros the second, isn't he? And I was thinking, well, who was Teodros the first? Right? I did some detailed research in the body. Did he? In the body library. Yeah. He's kind of king Arthur figure who reigned around the same time that Henry V was running the Battle of Abbasin Corps for about nine months. And James Bruce, an explorer in the 19th century, said there must have been something very brilliant that happened under this prince, but no one can remember what it is. Yeah. So anyway, this guy, Kasa, now Teodros, is the protagonist of our story. Flashman, you may recall, called him a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee. And Alan Morehead, who wrote two brilliant books on the history of the Nile, said he has a reputation in the historiography of a mad doglet loose, a sort of black reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible. But I think this is very unfair because actually when ploughed and first visited this guy's camp, Teodros liked to spend a lot of time on campaigns. So he was always intense. He visits his camp in summer 1855. And he's actually very impressed by Teodros. He finds him kind of reclining on a divan surrounded by musicians playing flutes and banging drums. So very kind of, this is absolute, you know, European meeting indigenous king bingo reclining on a divan. It's pretty much obligatory. Exactly. And that's in his report to the foreign office. He said this guy is very charming, very impressive. He's young, he's vigorous, he's polite and engaging when pleased, and mostly displaying great tact and delicacy. He said Teodros is very dedicated to the idea of restoring the glories of the Ethiopian empire and achieving great conquests, his man of untiring energy, his personal and moral daring is boundless. Now there are a couple of flaws that ploughed on notes as well. His violent anger at times, his unyielding pride as regards his kingly and divine right, and his fanatical religious zeal. However, Ploughden says this is a man we can do business with. He wants to reclaim Abbasinius ancient borders. He dreams of retaking Egypt for Christianity, marching all the way to Cairo and Alexandria, and then, and I quote a triumphant march to the Holy Sepulchre. Can I ask, the foreign office in London wouldn't necessarily approve of these goals, would they? They're mad goals. Because this of course is the period where they're starting to think about a Suez Canal. They don't want to offend the Ottomans. No, they don't want to offend the Ottomans, particularly with whom they, of course, are allied in the Crimean War. I mean, British interests in Egypt are extremely important to them. They do not want to alienate the Egyptians, and this, as we will see, becomes a problem. So, on top of that, Britain's Christian power, Ethiopia's the Christian power, is there any sense that, therefore, they are natural allies, or is Britain simply, it's all about real politics, it's all about imperial priorities, the Christian element just doesn't really enter the calculations of diplomats in London. It's important to some people, it's definitely important to plow it, and it's important as we will see, to lots of missionaries and missionary organisations, but not to the government. But to the government, I would argue, probably not. I think they certainly have religious prejudices, but there's an awful lot of rail politics in this, as we will find out. Anyway, plowed and says to Teodros, "Would you like to sign a treaty with Britain?" Teodros hesitates, "What he doesn't want to do is sign a treaty that would give British agents in Abyssinia diplomatic immunity." He says, "My word is law, and anything that undermines our sovereignty, I'm not happy with, so I don't really want to sign a treaty with you, actually." And plowed and thinks, "Well, fine, maybe he'll come round in time." And actually, Teodros doesn't seem like a terrible investment, so Flash Run paints him as this demonic kind of drunken maniac. But there are lots of ways in which he's actually quite a forward thinking. He's a would-be moderniser, actually. He wants to stamp out the power of the regional warlords. He wants to build a new road network. He wants a new system of royal justice. You could see him as the sort of Henry VII or something, wanting to impose order after years of chaos. He wants to fight slavery, because of course, slavery, the slave trade across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean is controlled by his Muslim rivals. And is that a kind of a gesture of economic warfare against the Ottomans, or is there any humanitarian in Pilsarital? That is a hard thing to say, because all that we know of, we don't really have that much insight into his inner world. I suspect there's an awful lot of political expediency in it, frankly. He also wants very pizza the great like. He wants to change the way people dress, so he wants Abbasinians to wear proper clothes. He wants them to wear shirts with special colored sleeves if they've done great service to the state. So that's nice. And he's absolutely fascinated by the outside world. So he loves meeting travelers. He loves hearing about Britain and France. He's obsessed with the Crimean War, but that's something that will be coming up in the rest of his history before the end of the year, isn't it? We'll be doing a series about the Crimean War. So Teodros would have loved that, because when travelers come, he always sort of says, "What news from Balaclava? Tell me of Sebastopol." You know, he can't wait to get all this sort of stuff. Doesn't he end up having a gun called Sebastopol in due course? He does. His favorite possession, a gun called Sebastopol. So he really has had an impact on him. Yes. But the Crimean War fascinates him and bewilders him. He cannot get his head around the fat. The Christian, Britain and France are allied with Muslim, the Muslim Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, against another Christian power, Russia. He really struggles to comprehend that. And that makes him wonder whether the British are quite as devoted to Christianity as they should be. Anyway, a year later, end of 1856, he has the highest-ranking visitor he will ever receive. And this is the Coptic Patriot Cyril IV, who is the sort of spiritual father of the Ethiopian church, and he comes to visit from Alexandria. And Cyril turns up, and he is very, very down on Abyssinium religious practice. Cyril says, "Look, you have far too many holidays, holy days, you have far too many saints, and they were wrong, your calendars, bonkers, all of this." And Teodros, he's completely conforms to Proudin's picture of him, because he Proudin said he was very hot tempered and proud. He goes ballistic at this. He locks up the Patriot, for a little while, and the rumours sweep Abyssinium, or Teodros is fallen under the sway of the English. Maybe he's going to convert to Protestantism. And he doesn't. Eventually, he releases this Patriot, and he kneels to ask his forgiveness, and he says, "I'm sorry, I locked you up." And Cyril says, "The problem of the years you've been listening to English visitors, don't trust the English. They're only pretending to be your friends. They are plotting," and I quote, "to undermine your power and conquer your country." Which they're not, to be fair to the English. No, which they're not, which they're absolutely not. But this is a thread that will run through this story. I think because the Abyssinians have been so isolated for so long, they have got it into their heads that their, you know, their neighbours are all plotting to sell them out or undermine them or conquer them or whatever. I suppose to be fair to him. I mean, the British do have a certain track record in. They do. Well, I mean, at this point, if you listen to the French, they do. But Teodros is actually still quite devoted to the British. He's still crazed their approval. He recognises that they're the, you know, the most powerful, the richest, the most modern country on earth. And so, when the patriarch leaves, he takes with him two letters, and one of them was dictated by Teodros himself. And this was a letter dictated to Queen Victoria. May this letter sent by the King of Kings to your dross of Ethiopia reach the Queen of England, Victoria. How are you? Are you well? I am well, thank God. I've received your envoy with love and friendship. Now you are the child of Christ, and I am the child of Christ. For the love of Christ, I want friendship. So that's nice. That's a great letter. It's a fantastic letter. How are you? Are you well? I'm well. I love it. I think he's my favourite Abyssinian king. It's basically like a cold call from a call centre, isn't it? How are you? How's your day going? No, it's not. It's like a pen pal. Yeah, it's cool. That's what it's like. So, the other letters from plow to the foreign office. And Ploughton says, "I think we should cement the relationship with Abyssinia. Could you please send Teodros some guns and ammunition and a handsome piece for his own use like a hunting rifle?" This is in 1857, and two years go by and Ploughton and Teodros hear nothing back. And then alas, Ploughton gets some message from the coast, London of sentiment package. What is it? There's a rifle, a screwdriver, and a case. I'm not auctioned. It's unclear whether the case is for the rifle or the screwdriver. That's for the screwdriver. And that is it. And his heart sinks because he knows this won't go down well with Teodros. Not even a letter. And the truth is, of course, the foreign office don't really care. Abyssinia is like a massive backwater. No one really cares about it. But it's also they've had the Indian mutiny rating, haven't they? So they've had other things on their mind. They've got other things on their mind. Anyway, time goes by. Teodros gets on with fighting the kind of regional warlords and trying to unite the kingdom, but it's much bloodier and more grueling than he expected. He stamps out one rebellion, another breaks out in the next door province. And at one point he says to Ploughton, "I have to save myself. This is a stiff-necked people, and it is necessary to chastise them before they enjoy the blessings which Providence has intended." He speaks for wizards very kind of rolling biblical cadences. And then in 1858, a key moment I think, his wife, who was a moderating influence on him, it was called Tewabak. She died in her late 20s and he was absolutely bereft. He married again for political reasons. He married a woman called Tiranesh. I say a woman, she was 12, and they didn't really get on. Whenever Teodros went to her tent, he would find her reading the Psalms. And she would just say to him, "Very coldly and curtly, I'm conversing with a greater king than you. Get out." He clearly finds this distressing because he starts drinking very heavily at around this point. He starts sleeping with random women in the camp. And he confesses to visiting European missionaries. He says, "I'm leading a very unchristian and just reputable life." And he feels bad about it. So there's that. Now the second key moment is in 1862 years later. Ploughton, his friend, is traveling across Abyssinia when his party is ambushed by rebels. Ploughton is wounded with a spear and he dies nine days later. So that's the end of him. He had an exciting time, but it ended prematurely. But I guess it's the way he would have wanted to go. It is exactly. Absolutely it is. So the British now need to appoint a new representative on the Red Sea coast. Again, it's not a priority for them. So it takes them two years to finally send somebody out. And during that time, Teodros' mental state declines from bad to worse. The missionaries who are writing back say he's increasingly vengeful and angry. He's like a man on the verge of a Titanic explosion. And part of this is obviously contextual. Abyssinia is a very violent place. There are constant uprisings. There's also I think a slight degree of paranoia. He's terrified that the British are conspiring, as we said with the Ottomans and with the Egyptians. He's obsessed with the idea that people in his entourage are plotting against him. So he will regularly hold purges of his senior officers, and he would cut off their hands and feet, or sometimes just one hand and one foot, and then he'd throw them outside to be devoured by hyenas. That's a horrible fate. So there's that. We already encountered him, saying to plow down, you know, the people of Abyssinia are rather letting me down. And he really comes to believe this. When he goes into rebel provinces, he's increasingly merciless. He calls himself the flail of the wicked, and he likes to quote one of the Psalms, "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked." Washing his feet in the blood of the wicked is very much what Teodras is about by the 1860s. And in order to do this, he's become particularly obsessed with guns. No one in history, not even the people who go to your brother and al-Mahre's festival, their World War Two Festival, not even those people are as interested in artillery as this guy. He loves guns. He has turned to a group of Swiss and German missionaries who had settled in a place called Geffat in northern Abyssinia, and he had allowed these missionaries in because they had presented themselves craftsmen. They said, "We'd like to teach, you know, interesting transferable skills to the Abyssinian people." And they'd built huts and a water wheel and the school and all this kind of thing. I mean, that's missionary kind of activity, isn't it? Yeah, missionaries are always building water wheels. They love that kind of thing. But building artillery is less of a missionary activity, I would guess. Exactly. He loves this one bloke whose Swiss quote, "Theophilus Valtmeier," who apparently is very good at mending muskets, very good with his hands. And he's always on to this guy, "Well, Mark, can you not build me a massive cannon?" And over time, he says to these sort of German-speaking Swiss missionaries, "Could you please build me bigger and bigger guns?" And he gets them to build blast furnaces and things. This is the conditions of them staying in his country. And the blast furnaces keep exploding, or because ultimately they're not gunsmiths, they're missionaries. No. It's a big ask if you've never done it before. Teodras is very impatient. And he says to them, "I want you to build me bigger guns." And I quote, "If you say you don't know how, I shall regard you as liars and you know what I do with those who deceive me." So that's ominous for these men of God. And it's against this background that the British finally appoint their new envoy. And he is a man called Captain Charles Duncan Cameron, and he rides into Teodras' camp in October 1862. And Cameron is a career soldier who had served in South Africa and indeed in the Crimea before coming to Masawa on the Red Sea coast. And when he arrives, he has a present for Teodras. It's two dueling pistols with a silver inscription. Presented to Theodore Emperor of Abyssinia by Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, for his kindness to her servant Plowden. Now these pistols are important. We will come back to them later. They will have an ironic function. It's great to have some dueling pistols back on the show after Alexander Hamilton. Exactly. So Cameron, he's the new guy, career soldier. He is not as pro-abyssinia as Plowden. He's sort of stiff. He's a bit inflexible. He's shocked by Teodras' bloodthirstiness. When Teodras goes into his rants about launching a holy war against the Egyptians, this guy, Captain Cameron, just sort of frowns and looks a bit pained because he knows this is bonkers. Had Plowden kind of said, "Yeah, that's great you majesty." Exactly. Plowden had been like "planding the pageantry" with apt biblical quotes. Exactly. And so now we get to a key moment in the story. Towards the end of 1862, Cameron leaves the camp to go back to the Red Sea coast. And Teodras gives him a letter, and the letter reads as follows. "In the name of the Father of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, one God in Trinity, chosen by God, King of Kings, Teodras of Ethiopia, to her Majesty, Victoria, Queen of England." Mr. Plowden used to tell me that there was a great Christian queen who loves all Christians. I was prevented by the Turks occupying the sea coast from sending you an embassy when I was in difficulty. Console Cameron arrived with the letter and presence of friendship. By the power of God, I was very glad. I've received your presence and I thank you much. Now, I wish that you may arrange for the safe passage of my ambassadors everywhere on the road. I wish to have an answer to this letter by Console Cameron, and that he may conduct my embassy to England. See how Islam oppresses the Christians. This is the letter. Cameron goes off with the letter. And weeks go by, and then months go by, and Cameron finally returns in June 1863, so this is about six months later. And Teodras says, "Has your mistress the Queen of England?" Gosh, has she written me a reply? And Cameron says, "Unfortunately, I've heard nothing. I've had nothing from London. But your Majesty, I will give my head if after two months the answer to your letter is not here, and then Cameron vanishes again." And Teodras hears rumors that Cameron has gone back to the coast, and he's actually in Sudanese territories talking to the Sudanese. Now, he is, because the foreign office have been asking him to investigate the local slave trade, which they're keen to stamp out. But Teodras thinks this bloke, he didn't seem very comfortable anyway, he was always shifty. He hasn't brought me the answer to the letter. I wonder if he's gone out there to sell me out to the Muslims. I knew that British would sell me out. This is what he's thinking. So more months go by, and all the time, Teodras' paranoia is building. He cannot understand why Queen Victoria has not replied to his letter. At best, it shows she doesn't care about him. At worst, it's a sign that she is actually plotting with his Muslim enemies. And then in October, his impatience and distrust finally boil over, and he completely loses it. And the man who provokes him is a missionary, called Henry Aaron Stern, who's German-born in Hamburg, and he's been sent to Abyssinia by a group called the London Society of Promoting Christianity among the Jews. So they specialised in sending people to the Holy Land, to Ottoman-occupied Palestine, to try to convert people, and they'd start to send people to Abyssinia as well. And Stern has been an Abyssinian since 1860, and he absolutely hated it. He's published a book called Wondering's Among the Fallashes, which is very caustic about the Abyssinia. He said of the people of Abyssinia, "There were a full stretcherous and insolent race, absurdly superstitious in their religious belief, and revoltingly obscene in their domestic relations." Can I ask, has he got an Abyssinian publishing dish? - No, this hasn't been translated, isn't it? - I don't think it's been translated, but somehow news of it has reached to your trust. This guy hates you, hates your people, and has written disabliging things about you in the British press. Anyway, Stern doesn't like Abbasini, he's planning to go home, and he's on his way home, went by an unbelievably unfortunate coincidence. He basically runs into Trotros' army, and some of them have been drinking. There's an altercation with him, and Stern ends up being arrested and beaten up, and he's dragged to Trotros' tent, and then he's thrown into a tent and manacled by his hands and his feet, and he lies there for weeks, and he's convinced that he is going to be killed, and basically the only thing that keeps him going is his Christian faith. And then five weeks later, Stern is dragged into this huge assembly of Trotros' troops, and the emperor is sitting there on his throne, and before the emperor's throne is Stern's closest colleague, 'cause another missionary called Henry Rosenthal, and he is also in chains, and Stern thinks, oh no, and a scribe reads out the charges against them. Stern is accused of mocking Trotros' counselors of undermining Ethiopian Christianity, of slandering the emperor as a war criminal, and I quote, worst of all, ridiculing the emperor's genealogy. He's definitely saying he's descended from Solomon, is he? - He is, he is absolutely. Actually, there's a hilarious moments of this camp. When they mention the genealogy thing, Trotros says to this guy, Stern, you doubt that I'm descended from Solomon. Here are the priests. They will recite my genealogy, and the priests start to recite the genealogy, and they do quite well at first, but apparently when they got to about the 15th or 16th century, they started to falter and to stutter, and then they started to argue among themselves, and Trotros went absolutely berserk and said, "Next time I tell you this, you will know, you will know my family tree." Anyway, so this is Stern, and then Rosenthal was accused of having written that the country would be better off under Egyptian rule. And Trotros says to the two of them, "You Europeans came into this country, and I loved, honored and respected you, but you are liars." And then they read the verdict. They are sentenced to death, and they drag back to their tents, but then nothing happens. Days pass, and the sentence isn't carried out. They are sometimes dragged out to the tents, and forced to watch the sort of bloody execution of Abyssinian rebels and peasants, but the blade never falls on them. And in fact, their guards say to them after a few weeks, the emperor has relented, he's probably gonna release you, like he's gonna forget all about it. And then on the 3rd of January 1864, they're brought before the emperor once again, and they're dragged before Teodros' throne, and they see to their relief around the throne, the British consul Captain Cameron, and a load of other missionaries. And Stern thinks to himself, thank God for that. You know, they've come and interceded for us, we are free at last. And then his next thought, he notices the shackles on Cameron's legs. And one of the other missionaries looks at him, and he whispers, "We are all prisoners now." And it's that's the point when Stern realizes that their nightmare and this whole bonkers story are only just beginning. And we will find out what happens after a break. (upbeat music) This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps. Many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked. - Yeah, there's a classic example of that time at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery, and it is of course the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions, and it's why Anthropic has found it on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people? Anthropic asked 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, "Will cancer ever be cured? "Can kids have a better future?" It turns out that there is hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claw.ai/restershistory, and keep thinking. - We are getting in statement from the 10th of that flight with 350 passengers on board. - The great gain, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. - We assess Prime Minister. - With high confidence, it was Russian. - Holden-de-Russian's accountable is world war. - They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. - Men in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Go to ask yourself, "You want to play?" - Or not. - You're the Prime Minister. - If done, nothing! - We would need to understand the policy context. - All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order or frago. - A frago that says to kill the President of Russia. - Yes. - New from Goldhanger. - Who is going to be able to pull this off? - You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy? - An audio drama journey like no other. - Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. - Devised as a technically rigorous, geopolitical action thriller. - We're a town-friendly community. - Where Britain plays its strongest arm. - He's the best. - Against its strongest foe. - Don't do it, Duffy! - Bear hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts. (dramatic music) - Welcome back to the rest of his history. It's May 1864 and we are in London, beating heart of a mighty empire, a city of railways and telegraphs and smoke. The crucible of modernity, absolutely tremendous days. And Dominic, in Whitehall, the foreign secretary, Lord Russell, is studying a scribbled pencil note which has been smuggled to the Red Sea coast and then carried by ship to London. And it reads, "My self-stern, Rosenthal Cairns, "Badal McCravy and McKilvy are all chained here. "Flad, Stager, Brandis and Cornelius "sent to Gaffat to work for the King. "No release until civil answer to King's letter arrives. "And it signed CDC, Charles Duncan Cameron, "and Lord Russell, the foreign secretary, "asked his officials, oh my God. "Are there any letters from the King of Abacinia "that we have neglected to answer?" And what's the answer, Dominic? - Well, they go digging into their files and guess what? There is. This is Teodros' original letter that he had sent with Cameron. And what did happen to this letter? It's an interesting story actually, a revealing story. It had gone across the Red Sea to Aden and then went from Aden to Bombay. And then it went back across the Indian Ocean to Suez and then it went across the desert to Alexandria and by ship from Alexandria to Marseille and then by train to the Channel Coast and then by boat across the Coast and then by train to London. So the journey of this letter is a remarkable story. It tells you everything you need to know about the kind of globalized world of the British Empire. But when it finally got to the foreign office, the officials didn't know what to do with it. They just saw it as weird and sort of distraction from bigger issues. And one of them wrote on Cameron's accompanying note, we can expect no advantage from meddling with the politics of Abyssinia. So the British actually do not want to intervene in Abyssinia, they're not interested in it. They forwarded the letter to the India office, it was filed away in the India office and people forgot all about it. Anyway, now, 18 months on, they dig it out again. And they draft a reply from Queen Victoria reply, which they hope, and I quote, "We'll tempt the savage to let our people go. It's addressed to our good friend, Teodros, King of Abyssinia." And Victoria, she says, "I've heard that you've detained some of our people." And she says, "Your majesty can give no better proof of this sincerity of the sentiments which you profess towards us than by dismissing our servant and any other Europeans who may desire it from your court and by affording them every assistance and protection on their journey." That's the Queen Victoria voice. That's the Queen Victoria voice, audio archive. And that signed Victoria, our Balmoral 26th of May, 1864. And they say, "Well, obviously we'll have to sense somebody with this letter to persuade Teodros to accept it as a sign of our friendship." And the reason they're doing this is not particularly that they're worried about the missionaries. I question how much they really care about the missionaries to be brutally honest. What they really care about is the French, of course. So this is the point when Sue is canal, mania is at its height. They are very anxious that if they alienate Teodros, He would jump into bed with Paris. The French will end up controlled. calling the Red Sea coast and that would mean the French would control the route between Suez and India. And we cannot have that. So they choose somebody to take this letter and to assure Teodros of Britain's friendship. And the guy they choose is a really, really remarkable man called Hormuzd Rassam. And Tom, you should like him on all kinds of levels. Well, he said, you're born in Mosul, wasn't he? Which is the home of Omar Muhammad who did an extraordinary bonus for us a couple of weeks back. Yeah. And he's, he's an ethnic Assyrian, Hormuzd Rassam. And an archaeologist, I know you love a bit of archaeology. He did some digging at Nimrod and at Nineveh. Well, Nineveh is basically Mosul, so just right on his doorstep. And now I know as well, you love the British Museum. And this guy, Rassam, did a lot of work for the British Museum. He discovered the Palace of Ashurbanipal, which you will know far more about than I do. And he was instrumental in discovering the epic of Gilgamesh, the tablets. We must do an episode on that. Yeah, the epic of Gilgamesh brilliant. Anyway, so this guy, Rassam, there should be a statue of him at the British Museum. He was such a tremendous man. He traveled to England. He went to Mordland College, Oxford. He converted to Protestantism when he was at Oxford. He became a massive anglophile. He's a man who I reckon would wear a tweed suit to bed in the 40 degree heat of Ethiopia, unquestionably. And the foreign office had employed him as their political agent in Aiden. You're right. He's a tremendous man. And Rassam is now in his mid 30s. He's, everyone says he's brilliant. Everyone says this guy is the absolute business. He's pleasant. He's polite. He's really good at archaeology. He knows loads about his Syria. He loves digging. He loves Britain. He's great. There's literally nothing to not to like. Exactly. The only person who doesn't like him actually is the Harry Flashman who found him oily in Flashman and his memoir Flashman on the March. But every writer who's written about this says Rassam is fantastic. Good judgment, sensible, calm, level-headed, all of this. Rassam arrives on the Red Seacoast at Masawa in July 1864 with two blokes, a Dr. Good Henry Blonk and Lieutenant Prido of the Bombay staff corps. They've come as his assistance. Both with suspiciously French names. Well, here's the thing. There are some writers who say the British sent Rassam, Blonk and Prido deliberately because if everything went wrong and they got into trouble, the British wouldn't care. So it would play well with the newspapers because they all had foreign names. That's the cunning. You see? That's the cunning of the British foreign office. That is the animal cunning with the British foreign office that has slightly gone missing recently. Definitely. We used to be a real country. So anyway, Rassam sends a letter inland to Teodross and he waits and two months go by and all the time he's getting trying to get intel on the guy he's got to do business with. So one, Teodross's reputation now is very bad. One traitor says to him, he's the scourge of humanity, the arch enemy of humankind. But the local ruler on the Ritikos says, no, that's not true at all. He says he's actually a very kind man. He's just been led astray by the natural bloodlust of the Abyssinian people. And then the local ruler adds the ominous remark, of course, he's also insane. So they keep waiting. It's incredibly hot. So they have to camp outside and what was once plowden's garden. There's cholera. There's a famine. It's all terrible. They're waiting for news. And finally, letters arrive not from Teodross, but from the hostages themselves. So these are stern, Rosenthal, Cameron and the other missionaries. Now, a lot of time has passed. They have been in captivity now for 18 months. And their conditions are sub-ideal. They've been kept chained up initially in the Royal Camp. They didn't see much of Teodross. Occasionally, when he'd been drinking, he would come into the tents where they were chained up in a massive rage. He would have them bound in very tight cords, sort of like ropes. And then he would have them doused in cold water, which seems a bit mean. Well, I don't know. It depends how hot it is. Yeah. You probably steam. Would you? You might steam. No one would want that. It's hot. You like a cold shower. He has a massive hatred of this guy's stern, a passionate hatred of the guy who had mocked his genealogy. He said, "Give me the name of the man who revived my ancestors or rip it from your heart." He sees obsessed with the idea that they have local collaborators. The time goes by. Their clothes are rags. They're living on that sort of handful of dried peas, rains in the summer. They're very sodden. They're miserable. They're very ill. And at the end of 1864, they are dragged out of their tents to join this long column of Teodross' prisoners. So these are captured rebels, disgraced officials, common criminals. They're marched out across the Highlands for seven days. And after a week, they're absolutely exhausted. And then finally they see ahead their destination. The towering cliffs of Magdala, which is Teodross' mountain citadel. And this is his favorite headquarters. The writer Philip Marston, who wrote a brilliant book about this, called the Barefoot Emperor, which I recommend to the listeners. He calls Magdala, his garrison, his prison, his stronghold and home, his asylum, his treasury, and his dungeon. This is the Helm's Deep of Abyssinia, this mountain fastness. If you go up to the top, you look out, you can see miles and miles around people approaching. Even a small force can hold this mountain indefinitely. And in the walled compound on the top of the mountain, Teodross keeps his most valuable treasures. And these are things he's looted from churches across Abyssinia. Oh, okay. So the British aren't the only people who've done some looting in this story. Oh, good. No, no, not at all. This is the stuff that will end up in Toronto. And he also keeps his most important prisoners. So his rivals, pretenders, the heirs to various regional kingdoms and things. Now, it keeps the European prisoners separately. They're in huts by the cliff edge, just 20 yards from the cliff edge, which some of them find disturbing me close. The huts are infested with spiders and rats. The hostages, the missionaries are fettered at the ankles. And then these fetters are connected by a chain to a manacle on their hands, but the chain that is a little bit too short. So they're hunched over the whole time. And if they want to move around, they're still hunched. And they develop severe spinal pain, which is not good. But from here, Cameron has smuggled messages to the coast. And as Rassam on the coast reads these messages, he's quite disturbed because Cameron says, I'm convinced that only military action will persuade the Emperor to release us. And he adds a note to Rassam. He says, for God's sake to not come up here, he will cage you as sure as a gun. And this leaves Rassam in a bit of a quandary. You know, do I not go? I'm am I ever going to get a letter from the Emperor himself? What shall I do? And then in August 1865, the Emperor's reply finally arrives. And it's a litany of grievances against Stern and Cameron in particular. But also implicitly, though not quite explicitly stated, there's an invitation to Rassam. Why don't you come and talk to me? So Rassam gets permission from London. And then he heads in land with his assistance, Dr. Blonk and Lieutenant Prido. The countryside by now is barren, desolate, scarred by war and rebellion and famine and plague. The people are kind of skeletal and ghostly, kind of, you know, it's like something from a zombie apocalypse or something. And all the time as they advance, it's very kind of Cortez and Montezuma or something. Because all the time, Rassam is getting these rambling letters from Teodros that lurch wildly from a kind of aggressive self-pity to, you know, polite, friendly apologies. So, as Sam doesn't really know what to make of this, anyway, the 28th January 1866, they reach Teodros' camp. And Rassam has been waiting for this moment for a year and a half. I mean, this is a very long-winded enterprise. And he gets into his finery, his best-blood diplomatic uniform, and Blonk and Prido are wearing the red uniforms of the British Indian Army. And once again, you'll be pleased to hear that they find Teodros reclining on a divan surrounded by musicians and Cortez and bodyguards. And Rassam hands over Queen Victoria's letter. And Teodros goes into a huge rant about his grievances, not just against the missionaries, but against his own people. He says, "My own people are useless as well. They're rebellious and violent and uncivilized. I don't know what to do. I'm beset by opponents. You know, no one understands me all this." And Rassam plays all this very skillfully. He doesn't argue with Teodros. He says, "Oh, I really do sympathise with you. You have a terrible job. You know, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes." You're the father of your people. Maybe the thing to do is to cultivate patience and tolerance. Maybe you can teach your people to do what is right. Anyway, I've got a letter here from Queen Victoria. I'm confident that when you read the letter, you will forget the past and try to establish amicable relations with England. And when Teodros hears this, he is delighted. He is absolutely, is really touched. In fact, he's so touched that that night he can't sleep. He's so excited. He's finally got they reply that he won't. from Queen Victoria. And the next day he adorn he dictates a new letter to Victoria. He says, "I know God has chosen you, from all men, to be the champion of religion, to be the friend of the poor and the oppressed." He says to her, "You must have heard of the ignorance and blindness of us, the Ethiopian people. If you find offensive what I was bold enough to write to you, do not be angry with me. Advise me. For you, the queen who God has chosen have had your eyes opened." I mean, who knows what Queen Victoria would make of this? Anyway, he summons Rasam to his tent and he says, "You know, I'm feeling so happy now. I'm going to release all the captives. I'm going to bring them down from there on the top of the mountain. I'm going to bring them down from the mountain at Magdalor and you can take them to the coast. You can have free passage." And Rasam, this is a massive result for Rasam. He is totally vindicated to the foreign officers' faith. And Tyotras says, "There is one catch. It's going to take quite a long time to bring the hostages down from Magdalor. And in the meantime, I've got some rebels to deal with. I'd love it if you would come with me." And Rasam says, "Yeah, fine." So they ride out to the head of thousands of men and during the march again, it's very monty's humor and quartets or something. Tyotras often says, "I'd like that guy to ride with me, please." And he questions him about the British Empire, how are you getting on in West Africa against the Ashanti, all this kind of thing. He keeps pestering him with questions about the Crimean War. He cannot get his head around the fact that the British won the Crimean War, but then signed a treaty with Tsar Nicholas I and didn't execute him. That blows his mind. So there's that. But then there's two themes that he keeps coming back to. It's like mind will wander and then he'll come back to these themes. One of them how the missionaries were very rude to him and rude about his genealogy. And whenever he talks about he starts shaking because he's so cross. And then the other thing he says, "Actually, I would like a formal treaty with the British who are across my brothers." And I would love it. He says, "I know Quee Victoria is too. I know she's very important and very busy and she's, you know, I'm small for either her. But I also know she has a lot of governors in India and I would love it if she would appoint one of her governors in India to be my sort of contact, my point man, just for me that I could talk to." And Rasam is very diplomatic, you know. He says to him, "Well, when I get back to London with the hostages, I will talk to her Majesty's government and I'm sure they'll look kindly on your Majesty's proposal." Teodrosters are great, thank you. They reach a place called Lake Tana. Here they part. Teodrosters going off to attack some rebels and Rasam is going to wait for the hostages. And Rasam waits by the lake side for the hostages. And every few days Teodros sends him gifts on letters. So Teodros sends him some bizarre gifts. He sends him muskets, pistols, manuscripts that he's looted. He sends Rasam an antelope, two lion cubs, two monkeys and a baboon. Oh, really? Yeah, could start his own zoo with this stuff. Is a menagerie? What does Rasam do with them? Didn't they just hang out? Just hang out the baboon and the antelope and the lion cubs. I mean, they're well known for getting on with one another. And also a load of irreplaceable ancient manuscripts. If ever I'm given an ancient manuscript, I make sure to put it with a baboon because I think what could go wrong? Anyway, on the 12th of March 1866, the hostages finally turn up. They've been marched down through the mountains. They're absolutely knackered. They're ill. There's 23 of them. Simulably they're not still, they haven't got this kind of, they're fettered to the ankles with their curved spire. They have been fettered all the way. How do they walk? It's just general trudging, I think. It's sort of hunched over trudging. Oh, that's awful. They're alive. I mean, that's the plus. They're chains because their chains are not removed until they get to the lake. And at that point, Rasam thinks, finally, you know, this is, we've sorted this out. Teotross, who at this stage appears absolutely lovesick. He's so infatuated with Rasam. He's still sending him presents. He sends him some cows. He sends him some money. He says, please don't go off just yet. I'm having a special medall made view. It's called the Cross and Solomon's Seal. I've also commissioned Special Shields for you and Dr. Blonk and Lieutenant Prido and a special golden saddle for you to mark our friendship. In all, Teotross sent Rasam 23 letters. And Rasam at this point starts to feel a little, that was you might, a little disturbed. This friendship has got an unhealthy dimension to it. Because basically it appears that Teotross has got a massive crush on him. A pash. And yeah, a pash. And Rasam becomes genuinely concerned. Is he ever going to, is he going to let me go? Because he seems absolutely assaulted with me. And at last, Teotross arrives back at the lake. And his first words to Rasam, perhaps a little bit ominous, because he, he takes him by the hand and says to him, I feel as happy as if I were visiting the Queen. So that's his old brilliant. And then Teotross says, I want to introduce you to my eldest son. Can you shake hands, please? And he says, I would really love it if Queen Victoria would adopt my sons as her wards. So that when I die, they may be looked after by the English and not allowed to govern badly. And Rasam says, yeah, we can probably look into that fine. Now, Teotross at this point is very erratic. I think there's probably a lot of drinking. He's still lurching between these attacks on the missionaries. And then he'll burst into tears and say, how much he loves Britain and how he loves Rasam and Queen Victoria. At one point, he gets very mortal in. He says to Rasam, I know that when you go, you will forget me. You will forget your friend. I mean, to be fair to Rasam, Rasam is not going to forget this, is he? No, this bloke has given you a boon and burst into tears in front of you. You're never going to forget him. You don't forget him. A man who gives you a boon. I remember all the people who have given me boons. So Rasam is a little bit anxious, but on the 13th of April, orders come that the packamp is going to be packed up and he thinks that long, alas, you know, we are going to go home. The missionaries wait on the eastern side of the lake. Rasam and Dr. Blanc and Lieutenant Prido cross the lake to go and say goodbye to Teodros. It's any polite say goodbye to him. And they get to his camp and they find a oddly silent and they're shown by the guards into Teodros' pavilion. And in his pavilion are all Teodros' courtyers and his bodyguards as usual who are just staring at them. But the throne is at the end of the pavilion and there's no Teodros on the throne, which they find weird. And at that moment, they notice there's no one on the throne. Rasam feels a hand on his arm and then he feels a hand on his other arm and it's the guards and he realizes they're under arrest. No. Yes, that's the twist. Oh my god. Yeah. I believed in Teodros' love for him. I think Teodros does love Rasam. So the missionaries by the way are being rounded up at this point again. Again. Oh and put back in their shackles. I put back in their shackles. Now let's come to this. What's going on? What is Teodros' thinking? There are various possibilities. Number one is that he was lying all the time. He was playing games with Rasam. Number two is that he wasn't but the last minute he was overcome by his hatred of the missionaries. And number three is he loved, he did love Rasam after all. Yeah, he couldn't bear to let him go. Couldn't bear to let him go. I think that seems to the light clear. Well, in his biography of Teodros and his sort of discussion of this, Philip Marsden says, you know, Rasam couldn't really understand it and like Rasam, we are lost in a labyrinth of contradictory messages made more confusing by the emperors growing paranoia. However, Marsden says probably Teodros is infatuated with Rasam and he sees Rasam as his best chance of getting friendship with Britain and get his British technology and there's a sort of link with the outside world and he simply cannot bear to let him go. He wants to keep him in a way quite touching. Yeah, in a weird way, it's actually quite touching. I mean, not for Rasam, obviously, but. No. Anyway, so three days later, the whole load of them are brought into his tent for yet another show trial. So it's now quite. there's about 30 of them. So Rasam and Prido and Blonk and whatnot. Yeah, he's collecting quite a lot, isn't he? Yeah, Teodros is collecting hostages. The full set. And Teodros says, this is all your fault, Rasam. You should have brought the missionaries to see me before you left. It was very rude of you not to bring them when you came to say goodbye. Is this your friendship, Mr. Rasam, that you wish to leave me and take away those who have abused me? And the next day, Teodros dictates a new letter to Queen Victoria. He says, I'm actually keeping your envoy and all these people as my guests. And in the meantime, I would like you to send me some skillful artists to make me some guns. Oh, they're always the guns. I want blacksmiths. I want gunsmiths. I want artillery specialists. And when I'm satisfied, I shall, through the power of God, give them a splendid payment and a great honor, send them back. Now, he's got to get this letter to Queen Victoria. And of course, he doesn't want to let Rasam go. So he chooses one of the missionaries to do it. And this is a German man with a terrible name of Martin Flad. And he's irreverent. The Reverend Martin Flad. The Reverend Martin Flad had also been sent by the London Society for the promotion of Christianity among the Jews. And Flad came to Abyssinia with his wife and three children. Flad doesn't want to leave his family behind. He hates Teodros, he calls them a savage, a cruel and human and sly despot. But he feels he doesn't have any choice. So, Flaad sets off with this letter. He makes very good progress. He gets to London in July 1866, and he goes to the foreign office, and he gives them the letter and he tells them Teodros' demands, and he says to them, "This bloke Teodros is mad." Don't send troops. If British soldiers set foot on Abyssinian soil, he will in the most cruel and barbarous manner slaughter our all our people. Just give him what he wants. You know, we've done hostage crises before. We did the Iran hostage crisis. This is a problem, you know, that is a perennial issue that governments have to face. Do you intervene militarily, or does that mean you risk the deaths of all the hostages? Anyway, the foreign office at this point think, well, we don't want to intervene in Abyssinia. They arrange for loads of stuff, a mad collection of stuff, a steam engine, a gunpowder mill, smelting equipment, a hunting rifle, and a telescope. This is all going to be sent to the Red Sea, and they're going to send a team of workmen to handle it. However, there is a catch. They say to flat, "You go ahead with a new letter from Queen Victoria, and when Teodros releases the hostages, he can have his smelting equipment, not before." So, flat goes back to Abyssinia. He gets to the Red Sea coast. There are messages from the hostages waiting for him, including his wife and children. They're all alive, but they're having a very, very weird type as guests of the emperor. So, on the one hand, Teodros has presented Rassam with his medal and his golden saddle. He threw a party for Queen Victoria's birthday, and he demonstrated some of his guns. He's taken Rassam's shooting, and they have had some excellent chats about Alexander the Great. Because Teodros is not just descended from Solomon, he's actually also descended from Alexander. I did not know that. Goodness. So, more complexity for his genealogists to wrestle with. Exactly. There's a lot going on there. On the other hand, occasionally Teodros will go mad. He will force them to watch him whipping his courteous to death, and he will go into these mad rants and things. And do we think these stories are true? Because Mad Death's Box, having rants the whipping people to death, is the kind of staple of. I think they're totally true. There's enough missionary. Some of these missionaries are very pious and slightly dull people. They're not making stuff up. The climax of this is he locks them one in a sort of black hole of Calcutta-style cellar. And then he comes in. They're one of the cellars, hunts over in their chains. He comes in with a bottle of arach, kind of raky type thing, and sits down and just says they're drinking and talking to them. And they find that very stressful. Can I ask what language are they talking in? He speaks Amharic. And do they, by now, speak it? I guess they do. They must speak some. Maybe there's interpreters there that we don't know about, but I think they must understand. Maybe they can only pick up one, you know, one in every four words, but they think they get the gist, Alexander, Solomon. He's drinking and chatting. And then at the very end, he's finished the bottle and he says to them very quietly and slightly sadly, my father was mad. And though people often say that I am mad, I never would believe it, but now I know it's true. And then Rassam says to him, don't say such a thing. And Teodros gets up and he goes to the doorway and he looks back and he says in a horse whisper, I am mad. Goodbye. I think that's a bit disconcerting, frankly. So that's the last they see of him for almost two years. Two years. Yeah. They left in that cell up for two years. No, no, they're brought out. They're brought out. In fact, what happens to them? Is they're taken back up to Magdala to the mountain citadel, 10,000 feet above sea level, and they're chained up and they're put in their hearts. Teodros goes off to fight some rebels. He's now proceeding with extreme cruelty, taking thousands of prisoners, massacring villagers, stealing people's sacred books, all this. So this is the picture that greets this guy flat when he returns to the coast. And the letters that he's got from the missionaries are all very bleak. So the Swiss missionary, the ofteness Valdomier says, if you brought all this stuff, you might as well throw it in the sea because Teodros would rather cut all the Europeans into a thousand pieces than hand them over. And flat's wife Pauline has written him a very depressing letter. I entreat you, don't trust, don't trust, don't trust. If the workmen come, not a single soul will be able to leave the country. Flat, however, is determined to come anyway. So he rides through this sort of war ravaged landscape and he finds Teodros in his camp. And rather, disconcertingly, Teodros is surrounded by the rotting bodies of starved horses. It's actually a bit like George Washington's camp. It's a valley forge, not clearing them up. Yeah. And flat presents Teodros with a telescope, a little taster of the gifts he will have when he releases the hostages. Geodros throws the telescope aside. And he says, the man who sends with his telescope only wants to annoy me. Geodros says, what's your queen? Got to say. And flat says, well, basically, if you don't release the hostages, you have no right to expect any further friendship. Teodros is shocked by this. He's totally silent. And then he says quietly, very well. I asked from them a sign of friendship, but it is refused to me. So be it. Flat has led away to join the hostages. So this is his reunion. I mean, he basically voluntarily goes back into captivity to see his wife and children. And that seems as that. Geodros is not going to let them go. The British are not going to give him on his equipment, a total stalemate. And the stalemate remains like that for six months. Geodros is off fighting rebels. The hostages are all huddled together at Magdala. And they're hearing ever more sort of blood-curdling rumours about his growing madness and cruelty. They are convinced that eventually he will come back to Magdala and he'll just say kill the lot of them. In March 1867, Dr. Blonk writes a note that is smuggled to the coast and then to the foreign office. And he says, "I'm going to tell you the whole story toodros in his rise, his crimes, our plight, his madness." And Blonk says, "The time for talking to this guy is over." And I quote, "Only one thing remains force." But of course, Dr. Blonk doesn't know whether his note is even going to get there, or whether anybody is listening or anything like this. And then one day in the early summer of 1867, a messenger stumbles into Teodros' camp and he has a letter come from the Red Sea coast. And the letter is an ultimatum from London. The British government have lost patience. They are giving him a three months to release the hostages. And after that, they will cut off all talks and the implication is that they will begin military action. Is Teodros' gunner except spoiler? He will not. And so it is that on the 19th of August 1867, Lord Derby's cabinet meet in London to decide their next move, and there's never any doubt really about what that will be. Diplomacy has failed. It is time for war. It's war! What a cliffhanger, unbelievable drama, and members of the Restless History Club can find out what happens next. The story of Sir Robert Napier's Abbasinian expedition and the great battle for Magdala right now. And we have a special incentive Dominic this week because club members will be getting a special bonus on some of the great characters of this story, the hostages, the adventurers, and particularly the mad story of what happened to Teodros' son, who improbably ended up as a schoolboy in one of England's great public schools. And not just any school. He went to Flashman's old school. Rugby. Amazing. So to hear all that and to hear Episode 2, if you're not already member of the Restless History Club, you can go to the restlesshistory.com. But for now, thank you Dominic. Goodbye. Bye bye. (gentle music)