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White Mughals

Page 60

by William Dalrymple


  27 Bodleian Library, John Palmer Papers, Ms Eng Lit C76, pp.82-3, 8 September 1813, John Palmer to William Palmer.

  28 Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,180, Vol. XLIX, October 1804-December 1805, f.328, William Palmer to Hastings, Berhampore, 12 October 1805.

  29 Bodleian Library, John Palmer Papers, Ms Eng Lit C76, p.115, 25 July 1810, John Palmer to William Palmer.

  30 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.138, 29 May 1806, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  31 Ibid., p.142, 5 June 1806, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid., p.145, 13 June 1806, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  34 Ibid., p.198, 29 November, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  35 Ibid., p.140, 2 June 1806, Calcutta, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  36 Ibid., p.150, 4 July 1806, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  37 Ibid., p.158, Calcutta, 23 July; and p.150, 4 July: both Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  38 Ibid., p.155, Calcutta, 18 July, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Ibid., pp.190-2, 7 November 1806, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  41 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C172, p.5, 25 November 1806, Thomas Sydenham to Henry Russell.

  42 Ibid., p.7, 26 December 1806, Henry Russell to Thomas Sydenham.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C168, p.1, 24 December 1806, N.B. Edmonstone to Henry Russell.

  45 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C172, p.7, 26 December 1806, Henry Russell to Thomas Sydenham.

  46 Ibid., p.1, 14 January 1807, Thomas Sydenham to Henry Russell.

  47 Ibid., p.11, 20 February 1806, Hemming to Henry Russell.

  48 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, pp.205-6, 22 March 1806, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  49 Ibid., p.207, 14 April 1807, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  50 Ibid.

  51 Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD135/2086, The Will of Lieut Col James Dalrymple, Hussein Sagar, 8 December 1800.

  52 Jacon Hafner, from his Reizen van Jacob Haafner eerste Deel, pp.112, 135, quoted in Sinnappah Arasaratnam and Aniruddha Ray, Masulipatam and Cambay: A History of Two Port Towns 1500-1800 (New Delhi, 1994), p.116.

  53 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.213, 27 April 1807, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  54 Ibid., p.216, 14 January 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  55 Ibid.

  56 Ibid.

  57 For Madras see Dodwell, op. cit., pp.187, 217, 220. Also Jan Morris, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (Oxford, 1983), pp.214-15, Davies, Splendours of the Raj, op. cit., p.30.

  58 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.4, 7 April 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  59 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, pp.226-30, 4 March 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  60 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.21, 21 April 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  61 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.31, 7 March 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  62 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.51, 14 May 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  63 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.236, 9 March 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  64 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.29, 29 April 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  65 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.236, 9 March 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  66 Ibid., p.244, 10 March 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  67 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.4, 7 April 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  68 Ibid., p.18, 19 April 1808.

  69 Ibid., p.30, 1 May 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell

  70 Ibid., p.41, 7 May 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  71 Ibid., p.51, 14 May 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  72 Ibid., p.88, June 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  73 Ibid., p.89, 11 June 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  74 Ibid., p.91, 11 June 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  75 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C152, undated letter (c.1809), Sir Henry Russell to Charles Russell; also letter from Sir Henry to Henry Russell, 13 November 1818, reprinted in Indian Archives, Vol. VIII, July-December 1954, pp.135-6. See also Peter Wood, ‘Vassal State in the Shadow of Empire: Palmer’s Hyderabad, 1799-1867’ (unpublished Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981), pp.106-7.

  76 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.98, 20 October, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  77 Ibid., p.102.

  78 Ibid., p.107, 29 December 1808, Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  79 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts D152, p.8, 9 October 1810.

  80 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.279, n.d., Henry Russell to Charles Russell.

  81 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C172, p.67, 7 June 1813, Lady Hood to Henry Russell.

  82 Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD46/15/3/1-30, Henry Russell to Lady Hood, Hyderabad, 23 September 1813.

  83 Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD46/8/1, Henry Russell to Lady Hood, Hyderabad, 5 November 1813.

  84 See Lady [Constance] Russell, The Rose Goddess and Other Sketches of Mystery & Romance (London, 1910), pp.1-18.

  85 Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD46/8/1, Henry Russell to Lady Hood, Hyderabad, 5 November 1813.

  CHAPTER 10

  1 Quoted in Archer and Falk, India Revealed, op. cit., p.54.

  2 Captain George Elers, Memoirs of George Elers, Captain of the 12th Regiment of Foot (London, 1903), pp.179-88.

  3 I would like to thank Michael Fisher for this information.

  4 For the children pining for India see Lady Russell, The Rose Goddess … , op. cit., pp.1-18. For Kitty apparently referring to a ban on correspondence with her mother, see letter in the private archive of her descendants, in which in 1841 she tells Sharaf un-Nissa: ‘I longed to write to you & tell you these feelings that I was never able to—[express?], a letter w[hich] I was sure wd be detained.’

  5 Edward Strachey, ‘The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick’, op. cit., pp.27-8.

  6 Certainly it was always William, not the Handsome Colonel, who wrote occasional progress reports on the children to Henry Russell. His letters clearly describe the children from observation rather than report, so it can safely be assumed that they spent a fair amount of time together.

  7 As he described Kennaway in his will. I have been unable to trace the whereabouts of the original of this document, and have worked from a copy made by William’s descendant Kenneth Kirkpatrick which he sent to Bilkiz Alladin in Hyderabad. I am very grateful to Bilkiz for twice giving me access to this and to her voluminous collection of Kirkpatrick papers.

  8 Brendan Carnduff, entry for William Kirkpatrick in The New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming). Brendan tells me that Kirkpatrick’s letters to Kennaway at this period seem to hint at serious opium abuse.

  9 The East India Company Collection is now part of the Oriental and India Office Collections in the British Library. William’s description of Nepal was published as An Account of the Mission to Nepaul in 1793 (London, 1811)

  10 In India Inscribed, op. cit. (p.235), Kate Teltscher comments that in his preface ‘Kirkpatrick describes Tipu’s epistolary self-portrait in terms drawn largely from the vocabulary of despotism: the cruel enemy, intolerant fanatic, oppressive ruler, harsh master, the sanguinary and perfidious tyrant … the final sentence [of the preface] which leaves much inferred rather than stated, suggests that Kirkpatrick is attempting to answer those few writers who depict the sultan in reasonable guise an
d dismiss the tyrannical image as an exaggeration.’ There is a direct parallel to this selective publication of documentation with a view to showing Muslim rulers in the worst possible light in the selective translations from the Arab and Islamic press produced by various pro-Israeli lobbying organisations today.

  11 Mark Wilks (1760?-1831), Military and Private Secretary to Lord Clive 1798-1803, Resident in Mysore 1803-08, when he left India. In retirement in England he wrote Historical Sketches of the South of India in an Attempt to trace the History of Mysore (London, 1810-14), and an analysis of the Akhlak i-Nasiri, a Persian metaphysical treatise.

  12 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/21, pp.1, 7; 4 and 12 November 1809, Mark Wilks to William Kirkpatrick.

  13 I am very grateful to Brendan Carnduff for his help with William Kirkpatrick, and for his clever and generous suggestions, especially relating to William’s possible opium addiction and his obsession with Tipu’s astrological systems.

  14 For William’s overdose see Strachey Papers, OIOC F127/478a, ‘Sketch of the Kirkpatrick Family by Lady Richard Strachey’. His granddaughter Clementina Robinson (daughter of Clementina, Lady Louis) wrote: ‘I think he suffered from rheumatic gout but he died from drinking laudanum which his servant had put by his bedside believing it to be senna.’ William was buried in St Clement Danes church in the Strand. His death notice in the Exeter Flying Post reads: ‘Thursday Sept 3rd, 1812: Died, Near London, on the 22nd Ult, most suddenly, Major General Kirkpatrick, of the East India Company’s service, late resident in this city. He had long filled high and important public stations in India, and was alike distinguished for his literary attainments, political knowledge, and private virtues.’

  15 There is an undated letter in the archive of his sisters’ descendants which refers to the amputation he was going to have to undergo, but does not specify which limb was concerned. The accident is mentioned in Sir Edward Strachey’s unpublished memoirs, quoted in Charles Richard Sanders, The Strachey Family 1588-1932: Their Writings and Literary Associations (New York, 1968), p.122.

  16 From the private archive of their descendants. The Handsome Colonel to Katherine Kirkpatrick, Hollydale, 8 September 1812.

  17 The Handsome Colonel died at Hollydale and was buried in St Clement Danes church in the Strand. There was a memorial plaque to him and William high on the north wall of the church, but it was lost when the church was burned down in the Blitz.

  18 Thomas Carlyle (ed. Charles Eliot Novem), Reminiscences (London, 1887), p.243.

  19 Ibid., p.244.

  20 Barbara Strachey, The Strachey Line, op. cit., p.113.

  21 Carlyle, Reminiscences, op. cit., p.247.

  22 Ibid., p.246.

  23 Alexander Carlyle (ed.), Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh (London, 1909), Vol. 2, p.15.

  24 Ibid., p.20.

  25 Carlyle, Reminiscences, op. cit., p.247: ‘Mrs Strachey took to me from the first, nor ever swerved: it strikes me now, more than it then did, she silently could have liked to see “dear Kitty” and myself come together.’

  26 Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, op. cit., Vol. 2, p.25.

  27 Ibid., pp.50-1.

  28 Ibid., p.235.

  29 Quoted in ‘Carlyle and the “Blumine” of Sartor Resartus’, Westminster Review, CLXLII, August 1894, pp.164-5.

  30 Barbara Strachey, The Strachey Line, op. cit., p.117.

  31 In Sanders, The Strachey Family 1588-1932, op. cit., p.134.

  32 Carlyle, Reminiscences, op. cit., p.248.

  33 From the private archive of their descendants, letter from James Phillipps to Kitty dated only ‘Friday Night’.

  34 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London, 1833-34); see Chapter 5, ‘Romance’, passim.

  35 There is a considerable literature on the identity of Carlyle’s ‘Blumine’ and ‘The Rose Goddess’. See G. Strachey, ‘Carlyle and the Rose Goddess’, in Nineteenth Century, Vol. 32, July- December 1892, pp.470-86; J.J. Cotton, ‘Kitty Kirkpatrick’, in Calcutta Review, Vol. CCXVI, April 1899, pp236-48; and the follow-up in Vol. CCIXX, December 1899, J.J. Cotton, ‘Kitty Kirkpatrick and Blumine’, pp.128-35; Henry Strachey, ‘Carlyle’s First Love’, Spectator, CIII, 9 October 1909, pp.559-60. See also Lady Russell, The Rose Goddess … , op. cit., pp.1-18. Other candidates for Blumine include Margaret Gordon and Carlyle’s wife, Jane Welsh. See C.F. Harrold (ed.), Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (New York, 1937), pp.37-8.

  36 G. Strachey, ‘Carlyle and the Rose Goddess’, op. cit.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Ibid., p475.

  39 How he did this is unclear, and Kitty tried to find out by writing to a contact in the Hyderabad Residency. Russell did not give her the picture immediately, but later left it to her in his will, much to the annoyance of his own family. See letter of Henry Russell to William Palmer in Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Mss Eng Letts C174, 2 October 1841, p.147. This letter contradicts the later and inaccurate account given by Lady Russell in The Rose Goddess … , op. cit., p.1, where Kitty is said to have first visited Swallowfield in the company of a Mrs Clive in the summer of 1846-although there may of course have been two different visits to Swallowfield.

  40 Anon., Some Notes on the Hyderabad Residency, op. cit., p.23.

  41 See Wood, op. cit., pp.269-71.

  42 De Warren, op. cit., Chapter 9.

  43 Ibid., Chapter 10.

  44 Ibid.

  45 The best account of Palmer’s bank, and Russell’s secret involvement with it, can be found in Peter Wood’s remarkable thesis ‘Vassal State in the Shadow of Empire’, op. cit., pp.348-61. For Russell bribing the printers of the Hyderabad Papers see ibid., p.357. See also the good short account given in Hawes, op. cit., pp.101-9.

  46 Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD46/8/1, Henry Russell to Lady Hood, Hyderabad, 5 November 1813.

  47 The letter is in the bound volume of Russell’s Persian correspondence in the Bodleian Library. See Chapter 7, n9, above.

  48 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Mss Eng Letts C174, p.147, 2 October 1841, Henry Russell to William Palmer.

  49 Ibid., p.154, 15 January 1842, William Palmer to Henry Russell.

  50 The letter, which is undated but must presumably be 1841, survives in the private archive of their descendants. The original is in Persian, and Captain D.C. Malcolm’s slightly inaccurate translation is attached to it.

  51 The correspondence survives in the private archive of Khair un-Nissa’s descendants in London. It is not numbered or referenced.

  52 See Wood, op. cit., p.362n.

  53 The correspondence survives in the private archive of Khair un-Nissa’s descendants in London. It is not numbered or referenced.

  54 Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Mss Eng Letts C174, p.174, 27 July 1847, William Palmer to Henry Russell.

  55 Bengal Regimental Orders, IOR/P/Ben/Sec/253, Fort William, 17 December 1813, No. 39, Regimental Orders by Lt. Col. Stuart, Futtyghur, 2 July 1813. Also No. 68.

  56 Gardner Papers, National Army Museum, p.206, Letter 81, Babel, 27 June 1821.

  57 Saksena, op. cit., pp.100-37.

  58 Parkes, op. cit., p.458.

  59 Quoted in Alex Palmer’s unpublished ‘The Palmer Family’, op. cit.

  60 Temple, Journals of Hyderabad..., op. cit., Vol. 1, p.240.

  61 Quoted by Lady Russell, The Rose Goddess … , op. cit., p.18.

  62 Edward Strachey, ‘The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick … ’ op. cit., p.29.

  63 See for example p.52.

  Bibliography

  1. MANUSCRIPT SOURCES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

  Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (formerly India Office Library), London (OIOC)

  James Dalrymple Papers, Mss Eur E330

  Elphinstone Papers, Mss Eur F88

  Fowke Papers, Mss Eur E6.66

  Gardner Papers, Mss Eur C304

  Kirkpatrick Papers, Mss Eur F228

  ‘Memoirs of William Prinsep’, Mss Eur D1160

 
Strachey Papers, Mss Eur F127

  Edward Strachey’s Diaries, Mss Eur F128

  Sutherland Papers, Mss Eur D547

  GE Westmacott’s Ms Travels in India, Mss Eur C29

  Home Miscellaneous 464, ‘Report of an Examination instituted by the direction of his Excellency the most noble Governor General, Fort St. George 7th Nov 1801’

  Home Miscellaneous 743, ‘The Affairs Of Messrs Wm Palmer & Co, Extract From Bengal Pol Cons 7th Oct 1825’

  Bengal Wills 1780-1804, L/AG/34/29/4-16

  Madras Inventories, L/AG/34/29/185-210

  Bengal Regimental Orders, IOR/P/BEN/SEC

  Bengal Political Consultations, IOR/P/117/18

  British Library

  Warren Hastings Papers, Add Mss 29,172, Vol. XLI, 1790

  Anderson Papers, Add Mss 45,427

  Brit Mus Egerton MS 2123

  Wellesley Papers, Add Mss 13,582-

  Bodleian Library, Oxford

  Russell Correspondence, Ms Eng Letts C155-7, C174, D150, D151

  Palmer Papers, Ms Eng Lit C176

  Ms Bodley Or. 430

  Devon Records Office, Exeter

  Kennaway Papers, B961M, ADD/F2

  West Country Studies Library, Exeter

  Kennaway Files

  Palk Files

  Archives Départmentales de la Savioe, Chambéry, France

  De Boigne archive

  National Army Museum Library, London

  Gardner Papers, NAM 6305-56

  Scottish Record Office, Registrar House, Edinburgh

  The Will of Lieut Col James Dalrymple, Hussein Sagar, 8 December 1800: GD135/2086

  National Library of Scotland

  Papers of Alexander Walker, NLS 13,601-14,193,

  National Archives of India, New Delhi

  Secret Consultations

  Political Consultations

  Foreign Consultations

  Foreign Miscellaneous

  Secret Letters to Court

  Secret Letters from Court

  Political Letters to Court

  Political Letters from Court

  Hyderabad Residency Records

 

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