The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia

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Provenance: One of three gold discs described in the museum’s temporary register as “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” Nevertheless, Nigeria has been promised the return of most of the 39 bronzes held by the Smithsonian Museum, among others. Yet Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments is currently unable to display the 500 already in their collection. And would it be worth it, given that the National Museum in Lagos receives an average of 30 visitors a day? A bank vault in Portugal (1) Bibliothèque nationale de France - Paris (2) Britain's Royal Collection (7) British Library (5) British Museum (18) Ethnological Museum - Berlin (1) Hughenden - National Trust (1) Leiden University Libraries (2) Pitt Rivers Museum - Oxford (3) The Cameronians Regimental Museum - Hamilton (1) UCLA Library - Los Angeles (1) Unknown (24) Unnamed buyer (4) Victoria & Albert Museum - London (18) Wellcome Collection - London (2)

Heavens is a good storyteller and guides us with a sure pen through the events of 1868 and beyond. He sprinkles in first hand sources throughout the book so that people who met or knew Alamayu, like Queen Victoria, can speak to us directly.Victoria took a shine to him and did her best to make sure he was looked after right until the end of his life. The first shall be last Fundamentally though it is a human story, about a small child cast adrift - about his fall from the mountain-top, to become “one of us”, to know good and evil. They were part of the original haul of manuscripts given to the British Museum in the aftermath of the campaign. Museum staff selected the six most beautiful volumes and presented them to Queen Victoria.

The book is written in an uneasily breezy style. Readers are told to “hold tight”, that “it’s a fair cop”, and there is a lot of “perhaps” and “maybe”. And in telling rather than showing, Heavens does Alamayu a disservice. His tragic tale needs neither elaboration nor anachronistic moralising. Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' LEMN SISSAY, author, My Name Is Why The columns, judging from the portions lying about, were apparently in their original state built up, clamped with iron and run with lead.All About History magazine “Andrew Heavens has done an extraordinary thing for British history, which is to tell a story from our not-so-distant past which has been almost unknown to most of us who live in the UK, but is very well known indeed to the people of Ethiopia, whose story is told here. He covers his material with a depth of knowledge and an impressive thoroughness, but with a lightness of touch in the way he tells a story that is, at the same time, profoundly human, deeply political, highly engaging, and which reveals much about our imperial past and how it continues to resonate in our own day. A compelling and essential read!” What: A 6th century column capital with acanthus leaves, made of white marble, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea Before his death Alemayehu had “hankered”, Heavens writes, for Ethiopia. During his lifetime his plight touched some would-be protectors, including Victoria (his Windsor burial was a respectful gesture), while one of her prime ministers, William Gladstone, condemned the removal, at the same time as the child, of Abyssinian spoils. He “deeply lamented”, Hansard recorded, “that those articles, to us insignificant, though probably to the Abyssinians sacred and imposing symbols, or at least hallowed by association, were thought fit to be brought away by a British Army.”

looted Maqdala and the orphaned Alemayehu (his mother died on the journey), was subjected to a fragmented upbringing that he spent largely, to judge by Heavens’s account and some piercing photographs, in forlorn misery. Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn Sissay What: An Aksumite coin, dated c. 350-450, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea So why, while it has learned to contextualise the Koh-i-noor, does the palace still assert proprietorship of a child victim of conquest? Since they’re safe from a rush on prince-restitution that would leave mausoleums empty, the greater risk for the royals would seem to be in sabotaging, with this intransigence, their own claims to have changed. Unless they really have lost him?

Presumably it’s the palace’s intention for Ethiopian petitioners to picture, as you do from euphemisms like “others in the vicinity”, scenes of such ghastly Hadean mayhem that they will tactfully withdraw. British subjects may, on the other hand, wonder if expert accounts, with diagrams, of what would become of the late queen’s body, disguised the fact that the royal vault is actually a chaotic ossuary in which unidentifiable parts of foreign princes are so carelessly jumbled up with those of Charles’s forebears that only DNA testing could positively tell them apart (some hair of Alemayehu’s father is in fact available, courtesy of Lord Napier’s pillaging Victorians). It would certainly accord with an earlier royal excuse for inaction that “identifying the remains of young Prince Alemayehu would not be possible”. Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodies, with some batches transferred to Frogmore, all at no recorded cost to the “dignity of the departed”, albeit that community cannot speak for itself.

Alamayu and his mother witnessed the horde of victory crazed British soldiers charging over their compound, grabbing whatever looked valuable, and (very probably) assaulting the women who lived there. His mother was only saved from molestation by a senior British prisoner and an officer, who arrived just in time to set an armed guard on the room in which they were hiding. A great mourning

The story of John Bell and Walter Plowden is like a cross between Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King and a volume of the Flashman Papers (tellingly, both Kipling and George Macdonald Fraser have a firmer handle on the nature of empire than Heavens, who is too eager to pass judgement on those “brought up in the deep prejudices of their time” – presumably our prejudices are of a shallower nature). Bell, a British explorer who had gone native on his travels, teamed up with Plowden, the Consular Agent for Protection of British Trade in the region, and became allies of the anglophile Tewodoros, who declared that “For the love of Christ I want friendship”, when he wrote to Victoria.