On his return to the Barnards after this ordeal, Wellesley diplomatically avoided commenting on the fare beyond venturing that ‘I would not have missed the sight of my worthy friend with the white teeth for twenty pounds.’4
In her diaries and letters, Anne Barnard gives a detailed record of the entertainments and diversions she organised for her distinguished guest. She names the various admirals, judges and governors who were called to dine with Lord Wellesley, the Dutch burghers who invited them to supper, even ‘His Excellency the Governor of Mosambique, a stately well-stuffed Portuguese … [attended by] a black dwarf 34 high’, who tried to bribe Wellesley with a gold-tipped cane. But a figure she never mentions is the one who undoubtedly had the most influence on Wellesley of all the people he met at the Cape: Major William Kirkpatrick.
By 1798 William Kirkpatrick, elder brother of James Achilles, looked much older than his forty-four years. Disappointments in his career, marital difficulties and years of painful illness all showed on his features. Two fine paintings of him by Thomas Hickey survive. In the first, painted in 1787, he looks an awkward if determined figure, holding in one hand the deeds of the orphanage he had just set up in Calcutta. There is a searching, slightly uncertain and quizzical expression on his features, as if he is trying to size up the viewer; he also looks a little impatient, as if he has much better things to do than sit around having his portrait painted. Only twelve years separate this from the second portrait, 5 painted in 1799, a year after Kirkpatrick met Wellesley at the Cape; but from the transformation that has taken place in the sitter you might guess it was thirty years. The tangle of unruly hair in the first portrait has retreated far from the forehead; there are bags under Kirkpatrick’s eyes; and he has lost a great deal of weight. He looks weary and perhaps a little disillusioned; only the upturned nose, the determined set of the lips and the slightly impatient expression echo the earlier figure.
Wellesley’s first letter to Dundas in London, written three weeks after his arrival at the Cape, is almost entirely concerned with William Kirkpatrick; indeed his conversations with Kirkpatrick take up not only the entire thirty-page despatch, but also a further forty pages of enclosures. The letter details a matter that was to be a central concern not just of Wellesley and Dundas, but of both Kirkpatrick brothers in the months ahead: the growing French influence in the courts of India.
‘Among the subjects you recommended to my early consideration upon my arrival in India,’ wrote Wellesley, you particularly urged the necessity of my attending with the utmost degree of vigilance to the system, now persued almost universally by the native princes, of retaining in their service numbers of European or American officers, under whom the native troops are trained and disciplined in imitation of the corps of seypoys in the British service.
By accident I found at this place, on account of his health, Major Kirkpatrick, lately Resident at the Court of Hyderabad, and formerly at that of Scindia, and I have endeavoured during the period of my detention here to collect from him whatever information he could furnish respecting the European or American officers and the corps commanded by them in the service of the Nizam.6
Wellesley had asked William Kirkpatrick to provide written answers to a range of questions about the French mercenary forces employed by the Nizam, notably ‘one commanded by a Frenchman by the name of Raymond’ and officered by ‘Frenchmen of the most virulent and notorious principles of Jacobinism … an armed French party of great zeal, diligence and activity’. The answers he received so impressed him that he not only forwarded them, unedited, to Dundas, he also begged Kirkpatrick to abandon the plans he had been making to return to England, and to take up a job at his side in Calcutta, as his Military Secretary.
William had serious health problems which had developed in India—he was suffering in particular from a severe and very painful combination of gout and rheumatism—but when Wellesley made him the offer he promised to consider it, subject to the success of a cure at ‘the hot mineral baths about 70 miles from here’.7 His ultimate acceptance of Wellesley’s largesse changed the course not only of his career, but also that of the man he had left as Acting Resident at Hyderabad: his younger brother James.
Several years later, after William had retired to England, Wellesley looked back to that meeting at the Cape and wrote that he ‘had no hesitation in declaring that to [William Kirkpatrick] I am indebted for the seasonable information’ which enabled the Governor General to pull off the remarkable successes of his first two years in office. He went on:Kirkpatrick’s skill in Oriental languages, his acquaintance with the manners, customs and laws of India are not equalled by any person whom I have met in this country. His perfect knowledge of all the native courts, of their policy, prejudices and interests, as well as of all the leading political characters among the inhabitants of India, is unrivalled in the Company’s Civil or Military service … These qualifications recommended him to my particular confidence. He possessed no other recommendation, or introduction to my notice.8
Kirkpatrick, Wellesley emphasises, rose on his merits, not on the influence of his birth or his patrons. Yet even Wellesley probably did not know quite how far William had come in his life, nor from what inauspicious beginnings. For William Kirkpatrick was not in fact James Achilles’ full brother, but an illegitimate half-brother,ad born in Ireland to a Mrs Booth, ‘the sister of Mr C—the well known anarchist’, with whom William’s father had had a brief affair. Throughout their entire childhood, William’s legitimate half-brothers, George and James Achilles, were totally unaware of his existence.
The father of the Kirkpatrick brothers was Colonel James Kirkpatrick of the Madras Cavalry, known universally as ‘the Handsome Colonel’. This name was apparently a reference not only to his good looks and ‘very dark brown eyes’, but also to his rackety love-life. The Bloomsbury matriarch Jane Maria Strachey, mother of Lytton, was married to William Kirkpatrick’s grandson, and spent many months researching the Handsome Colonel’s roots as part of her obsessive mapping of the Stracheys’ genealogy. A pious Victorian lady much given to displays of public devotion,ae she was not entirely pleased by what she discovered. The Handsome Colonel, it turned out, was born in 1730 on a plantation in Charlestown, South Carolina, to which his family had fled from Dumfriesshire after being implicated in the failed 1715 Jacobite uprising. More alarming still to Lady Strachey was the discovery that the Colonel’s mother was ‘probably a Creole’. Sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century the family returned to Britain,‡ where the Handsome Colonel embarked on what Strachey described as ‘an adventurous and irregular life’ more distinguished for its amorous conquests than its military ones.9
William Kirkpatrick was born when his father was a bachelor of twenty-four; he was raised at boarding school in Ireland, supported but publicly unacknowledged by the Colonel. When William was only four, the Colonel set off for India where he joined the Company’s Madras Cavalry as an ensign. In due course, when William was old enough, the Handsome Colonel purchased his illegitimate son a military cadetship in the Company; but they never met in India, for the Colonel’s career there lasted only eight years, and by the time William arrived in 1771 the Colonel had long since left.
Before returning to England, the Handsome Colonel had married in Madras Katherine Munro, the eldest daughter of Dr Andrew Munro, the founder of the new Madras hospital. Dr Munro was a controversial figure in the Madras Presidency. He had, by all accounts, great belief in the efficacy of his ‘Hysterick drafts’, but was renowned for his short temper and violent dislike of anything he thought might approach hypochondria. At one point ‘nineteen covenanted [Company] servants’ took out a formal complaint against him for his conduct; in particular they noted that when one of them wanted a powder to cure him of a severe case of scurvy in the teeth, Munro had written to his deputy, ‘Sir, pray give that impudence what he wants and let me not be plagued with his nonsense.’10
A contemporary account of Dr Munro’s hospital shows that
the doctors’ attitude to hospital management reflected his no-nonsense approach: ‘I never heard of such irregularities as at present exist in the Presidency hospital,’ wrote a visiting surgeon.
I have frequently, during my short attendance, found in visiting the sick two or three of them lying in a state of intoxication, and I have heard of others who were not under my charge being in a similar condition. It is not an uncommon practice of the patients to form parties, often with the sergeant of the guard, to go into the Black Town [the Indian quarter of Madras] where they generally remain during the greater part of the night, committing every kind of enormity. The hospital in consequence becomes a scene of riot and confusion during the night, and the shade and other unoccupied parts of the hospital are places of resort for gaming and boxing during the day.11
For all this, the marriage between the Handsome Colonel and Munro’s beautiful daughter was apparently a passionate one, and within two years Katherine had given the Colonel two sons, George, born on 15 July 1763, and James Achilles, born thirteen months later, on 22 August 1764. Both were baptised in St Mary’s Church in the Fort of Madras, where Katherine and the Colonel had been married. But when James Achilles was eighteen months old, his mother died of a sudden fever aged only twenty-two, despite—or perhaps partly because of—the ministrations of her father. James and George must presumably have been brought up by Indian ayahs until their father returned home to England three years later. Never one to miss an amorous opportunity, the Handsome Colonel fathered yet another illegitimate child—this time a daughter—on the boat home in a brief affair with a Mrs Perrein,af the wife of a Portuguese Jewish mercenary in the service of the Nawabs of the Arcot.12
There is a gap in the archives concerning the period James and George spent in England as boys. While their father set off East again, this time to command Fort Marlborough in Sumatra, all that is known is that the two brothers were briefly sent to Eton, where they must have been younger contemporaries of Richard Wellesley, and that their schooling was finished off in ‘various seminaries’ in France.ag In between terms, they spent the holidays with their Kirkpatrick grandfather at Hollydale near Bromley in Kent. Their grandfather had by now sold his Carolina plantations, abandoned his Jacobite sympathies, and belatedly—and somewhat unsuccessfully—embarked on the life of an author: his political works were judged ‘very dull’,13 and his most notable production was a slim volume of medical research entitled Putrifaction. In March 1779, at the age of fifteen, after just eleven years in Europe, James returned to India, the land of his birth. As he had done with James’s elder half-brother, the Handsome Colonel had obtained for him an East India Company cadetship, based in Madras.
It was inevitable now that William and James would meet. Lady Strachey had in her possession the Handsome Colonel’s diaries and letter books, all now lost, which gave an indication of the manner in which it happened. She reported her discovery in a letter to a relation:When James Achilles had gone to India & was about to go to the same part in which William was, their father wrote to desire him to form the acquaintance of a young gentleman of the same name who he cannot do better than model himself upon; shortly after this he is writing to J.A. of William as ‘your brother’. In a subsequent letter in which he reproves J.A. of negligence towards a natural [i.e. illegitimate] son of his own, he enters somewhat at large into the question; he says in his opinion there is no difference in the duty a parent owes to his legitimate and illegitimate children; & that he thinks James will agree with him that they both know an instance in which the natural son was superior in capacity & attainments to the legitimate. 14
Despite the ten-year gap in their ages and the strangeness of their meeting, which seems to have taken place in 1784 or 1785, the two half-brothers immediately became close. Judging from the tenor of their often moving and heartfelt letters, the relationship seems to have given a much-needed emotional prop to both men. Of the two, William was the senior, but he seems also to have been the more vulnerable and insecure; hardly surprising perhaps when the loveless and institutionalised nature of his childhood is taken into account.
A strong impression of William at the beginning of his career—a lonely and melancholy teenager washed up in India without money, backers or patrons—survives in the letters he wrote throughout the 1770s and eighties to his great friend John Kennaway.15 Kennaway was a grammar-school boy, the son of an Exeter merchant who came out to India in 1772 with his brother after being presented with a cadetship each by their East India Company cousin, Richard Palk. The brothers had nearly died on arrival when their ship was wrecked in the mouth of the Ganges, and they ‘presented themselves to Governor Hastings with nothing but the clothes on their backs’.16 Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Kennaways were well-connected, and John quickly overtook William Kirkpatrick—who was a year his senior—in the race for preferment. This did not get in the way of their friendship, however, and letters William wrote to Kennaway are surprisingly deeply felt.
In the first, dated 18 January 1774, Kirkpatrick writes warmly that he is ‘pleased with the proof you have given me of your affection … and I do assure you I regretted your absence as much as my amiable friend did mine’. A year later, the tone is more emotional: ‘You know yourself and (I hope) me too well to doubt the sincerity of my affection for you,’ he writes. By 1777, the tone has become close to the romantic: ‘I am dull, stupid and melancholy,’ writes an anguished Kirkpatrick. ‘In a word I am low spirited … [and] I have been low spirited ever since I left you: I am still low spirited: and low spirited shall I continue.’ He talks of ‘all I have suffered since my separation from you’, and how ‘my promised bliss’ has been snatched from him by Kennaway’s departure.
Kirkpatrick finally declares himself to Kennaway in a letter of the period which is dated only ‘12 Dec’. The two boys have had a tiff, and Kirkpatrick sits up late writing to his friend attempting to explain his feelings:My dear Jack,
You had not been gone last night two minutes when I wished to see you again. I thought I had a hundred things to tell you, which had not occurred to me while you were with me. To say the truth you left me but half happy: for though our mutual and renewed assurances of invariable friendship were productive of the greatest pleasure I ever felt—yet it was damp’d considerably by your hasty departure. Ah my dear friend! Had you known my nature you would not have doom’d me to suffer a whole nights uneasiness without having been thoroughly convinced of the capaciousness of my disposition.
I have a heart which though it is capable of the most tender attachment, cannot silently brook the least appearance of slight or indifference in its master—you my dear Jack are its master, and while you govern it like a sincere and affectionate friend, it will be in all situations obedient to your pleasure.
Thus I have told you my mind with that frankness which ever attends true affection.
Adieu my dear Jack
W Kirkpatrick
Monday night.
It is difficult to know how to interpret these tortured letters, given that at the same time as he was writing them, William was living with an Indian women, Dhoolaury Bibi, by whom he fathered two Anglo-Indian children, and with whom he maintained a relationship until the end of his life, despite being married to an Englishwoman—Maria Pawson—for twelve years in the middle. There is no evidence that Kirkpatrick had any sort of physical relationship with Kennaway, and it is perfectly possible—even probable—that the boys’ romantic friendship was entirely platonic; but equally the possibility must remain that part of William’s melancholy came from suppressing an unresolved and apparently unconsummated bisexuality.ah
In 1784, after thirteen years in India, William returned to England to consult doctors and recover his health. He brought with him his two Anglo-Indian children, Robert and Cecilia, then aged seven and four, whom he placed in the care of the Handsome Colonel. The Colonel had recently retired from Sumatra to Hollydale, where James and George had been brought up, but which William had ap
parently never seen. Though his father agreed to take in the children, the meeting between father and son was not a success: ‘I found my father and all my other connections in perfect health,’ William wrote to Kennaway from London, ‘but I was so unhappy as not to find the former in that temper of mind necessary to his own and my felicity. Disappointments and other accidents of fortune not merited by him, have so far formed his disposition that, did nothing else make my speedy return to India proper, that consideration alone would render my continuance in this country exceedingly unpleasant.’
In stark contrast to the pain of visiting his father, William spent a happy month with Kennaway’s family in Exeter, writing to his friend that he would ‘reserve the history of my visit, and my account of the family, for the happy moment when I shall again have the pleasure of embracing my dear Jack. Suffice it for the present to inform you that I passed near a month among them with a satisfaction that nothing but your presence could have increased.’ Nevertheless, the visit to England brought home to William as nothing else the constraints under which he was forced to live. In India his talents and position had gradually brought him status and respect; but in England he was no one, still the unacknowledged and illegitimate son of a rakish nabob. More to the point he was poor. In India the friends he had made were of a different class and a different economic bracket to him. Visiting the Kennaways, he realised suddenly the impossibility of ever returning to England, unless he were first to make his fortune. In a letter to Kennaway he tried to explain to his friend how he felt:… It is impossible for me to describe how impatient I am to return to India—not that were I in possession of the means, I could not live more to my satisfaction in England: but without those means England instead of being a paradise must be a Hell to every man who returns from India with a grain of feeling or virtuous pride. Here have I a few friends (the only substantial solace or blessing that life affords) whom I love and esteem very heartily: but from whose society I should be obliged to banish myself were I to stay in England another year: for they being men of fortune, how could I approach them, or associate with them when not worth a groat? Which situation therefore is irksome—is painful—beyond expression. I will therefore return to India as early as possible: and there I will live the remainder of my days, unless by acquiring a fortune (which, by the bye, it is hardly possible I ever should) I shall be defended from the cruel necessity of cutting myself off from the society of all those whom I love.17
White Mughals Page 10