by Anand, Anita
The images were probably taken by Sophia’s father. The Maharajah was a passionate photographer, keen to embrace all the latest technological developments, such as the ‘gelatin dry-plate’ process which gave ‘instantaneous photographs’, and allowed him to indulge his passion for photography at home among his family. With her increasingly chubby cheeks, her thatch of thick wavy black hair and her intense dark eyes, Sophia made a delightful subject. Not only was she an attractive child, she also sat obligingly and unusually still on her mother’s lap as the Maharani gave the faintest of smiles in an otherwise formal Victorian pose.
Sophia’s birth also coincided with the end of the Maharajah’s great rebuild. Thirteen years after he had begun to remodel the house, carpenters and masons had all finally left and Elveden’s now mature gardens were beginning to flourish. And there were more than just flowers to look at in the summer beds. Huge eagles and sleepy-looking vultures chained to posts watched as the Duleep Singh children played amidst enclosures filled with ostriches, rare parrots and monkeys. Laughter echoed throughout the house, as the family was treated to the spectacle of servants chasing dangerous escapees across the grounds.11 Footmen were regularly called on to capture jewel-coloured birds out of the trees, and the unluckiest were ordered to break up fights between a bad-tempered baboon and a sadistic local jackdaw.12 The estate had an air of surreal but pleasant madness.
The nursery, in the south wing of the house, was a particularly happy place to be. Perhaps in consequence of the age difference between Sophia and her next oldest sibling, she found herself treasured by her brothers and sisters, and never had reason to develop their uncompromising survival instincts. She brought calm to the nursery, distracting the siblings from their arguments as they cooed over her crib. The children shared four enormous bedrooms, and nestled between them, a plainer smaller chamber served as bedroom to their nanny, Miss Date, with whom all the children formed a close attachment.
Like his wife, Duleep reserved a special affection for his youngest daughter. He showed his partiality by asking Queen Victoria to be Sophia’s godmother, an honour she had already bestowed on his eldest son, Victor, but on none of the other children. It was a general custom that all the Queen’s godchildren were named after her: the boys were called ‘Victor’ and the girls either ‘Victoria’ or ‘Alexandrina’, the monarch’s other name. Duleep decided, not for the first time, to throw convention to the wind. ‘Sophia’, the child’s nursery name, was made official and echoed that of her slave grandmother on her mother’s side. It was spelt differently and pronounced with stretched vowels according to the fashion of the day – ‘So-fire.’ For her middle name, Duleep acknowledged the Queen, but twisted the traditional Alexandrina into Alexandrovna. The unlikely interpretation of tradition bothered no one. Duleep seemed above reproach.
Grand titles held no place in the nursery, however, and Sophia was known by her brothers and sisters simply as ‘Saff’ or ‘Sophie’.13 Her bossy sister Princess Bamba gave her her own title, ‘Little Asa’, which only she was allowed to use. Sophia seemed to be blessed with beauty, fortune, favour and happiness; the Maharani had many reasons to be happy, chief among which was the state of her baby girl’s immortal soul.
For many years the Maharani had fretted over whether her children were going to hell. Although their father was a church-going Christian who knew his Bible, Bamba was aware that his religious conversion had happened only after a childhood in which, in her opinion, he had been brought up amongst heathens in India. Although she knew little about her husband’s Sikh roots, she knew that she feared them and was constantly worried that his former faith might somehow taint them all. Anxiety made Bamba ill, and she confided the depth of her concern to her friends at the Cairo mission: ‘the Lord’s mercies have been great to me in restoring me to health and strength again. May my heart be quietened more and by his Holy Spirit, that I may serve him as I ought. Our little ones are on the whole dear good children, still one sometimes sees the old nature rising up.’14
‘The old nature’ was a wild and unfettered spirit which all Sophia’s siblings seemed to share. The Maharani Bamba attributed these negative traits to her husband’s ‘godless’ past, but with the arrival of Sophia, who presented evidence of no such torment, she seemed reassured.
Before Sophia’s first birthday, the family idyll at Elveden was beginning to show cracks. For some time Queen Victoria had been receiving reports about the Maharajah’s expenditure; not only had he sunk a fortune into the bricks and mortar of his house, but also he was haemorrhaging funds as he continued to try to turn Elveden into the greatest estate in Britain. The India Office handled his annual budget of £25,000 a year, but the Maharajah was sending them invoices to settle as if there were no limit to his income. Apart from the expense of his hunting estate, he had a terrible gambling habit. The debts were building faster than the India Office could pay them. After hearing yet another complaint from her Secretary of State, the Queen sent a series of representatives to advise His Royal Highness to temper his spending, and his behaviour. He ignored them all.
At colossal expense he hired the best gamekeepers for Elveden, stocked rabbits, pheasants and grouse, so that the estate was teeming with targets. He also installed an enormous glass mews in which to keep his hawks. As a boy in the Punjab, Duleep had become a skilled falconer, and he now collected birds with the zeal of an unrestrained schoolboy. His Icelandic silver-plumed gyrfalcons, for centuries the preferred bird of kings and nobles, were suited to the British climate; his Indian hawks, however, were not. Though they dropped dead from the cold each year, the Maharajah insisted on restocking them. He would send for more every year, giving no thought to the cost of catching, crating and shipping the birds from the Punjab.
This passion, which may have seemed like a mania to his family, won him many international plaudits. France’s Champagne Hawking Club, set up in the wine-growing region in 1865, was the oldest association in the world. Hundreds of hunters would gather in the plains of Chalons-sur-Marne to show off their skills every year under its aegis.15 However, when the Franco-Prussian War was declared in 1870, the club shipped its entire stud of hawks to Elveden;16 there was no greater compliment that could be paid in the world of falconry. The Maharajah took great pleasure in training the birds himself. He tied small brass bells to their feet, upon which he had inscribed the words, ‘£2 reward for safe return. If caught alive put the Hawk in a hamper, give it some fresh meat or birds, not salt meat, send it as addressed.’17
The hunting grounds of Elveden soon became the place to go for unfettered carnage and the Maharajah enjoyed the shoots more than anyone. Sophia was only four months old when the Prince of Wales made a particularly bloody visit to her home. As Bertie wrote in a letter to one of his friends, all were flushed with the excitement: ‘We had the most extraordinary day’s shooting having killed yesterday and today close on 6,000 head, nearly 4,500 of which were pheasants! It is certainly the most wonderful shooting I ever saw, and I doubt whether such bags have ever been made before.’18
In order to knock the greatest number of birds out of the sky in the quickest time, the Maharajah would sit upon the ground, on a specially designed low stool, and wheel himself around, shooting as he spun. The method was effective, if not elegant. By the time of Sophia’s infancy, her father was beginning to lose his hair and run to fat. He looked like a rotund spinning top as he blasted the skies. Yet despite his comical appearance, few could rival the Maharajah’s deadly aim. The year Sophia was born he held two separate sporting records: the first for bagging 780 birds for a thousand cartridges expended, making it the largest hunting haul achieved by one gun in England; the second for shooting 440 grouse in one day in Perthshire,19 an astonishing ratio of bullets to carcasses.
Sophia’s brothers were encouraged to follow in their father’s footsteps from an early age. Both Victor and Freddie learned to handle guns before their teens and became talented marksmen. As their guns thundered away outside, Sophia
gurgled in her crib, while the other girls spent their time playing with their dolls on the third-floor nursery, on the sunny south side of the house.20 In time, Sophia and Catherine learned to hate firearms. Princess Bamba, perhaps affronted at being left behind while her brothers accompanied their father, maintained a jealous fascination towards them.
By 1877 the British government had begun to issue far blunter warnings to the Maharajah about his spending. Duleep was indignant. He believed that as a king, albeit a deposed one, he was entitled to live any way he pleased; the great fortune that he had as a boy and which he had signed over to the British guaranteed it. Duleep’s anger was further fuelled when he saw the way in which other deposed Indian monarchs, who had given up far smaller kingdoms than his own, were receiving more lucrative settlements. The Maharajah began to question whether the Queen and her imperial agents had taken advantage of him when he was just a child.
He started to delve deeper into his past, his mother’s imprisonment and the period leading up to his exile. Turbaned strangers began to mysteriously appear in Suffolk, filling the Maharajah’s mind with stories of his father, the Lion of Punjab, and of the great kingdom which the British had stolen from him. They also reminded him of the words of Jindan’s prophecy: that he would return to India as a mighty ruler and a Sikh saint. Gradually, but inexorably, the ideas spread through the Maharajah’s mind like a drug. More and more Duleep showed signs of bitter disillusionment. For weeks on end he would be morose and irritable. Sophia and her brothers and sisters were ushered away from their father who was spending most of his time behind closed doors, writing and researching. The Maharani Bamba, in whom he felt unable to confide, became nervous of her husband’s moods.
On 9 January 1878, the Queen’s bankers, Coutts, wrote to inform the Maharajah that he was heading for financial disaster.21 India Office representatives visited the Maharajah, telling him to cut back on his excessive spending with immediate effect or face repercussions. Duleep responded by going on a spending spree and publicly challenging the India Office to return almost half a million pounds-worth (more than £50 million today) of family jewels, which he insisted were never subject to the 1846 Treaty of Lahore, along with over a million pounds-worth (£100 million today) of ancestral lands.22
Though the children sensed their father’s anger they were far too young to understand the precise cause. Victor and Frederick confidently strode about Elveden in formal tweed suits, like miniature versions of their father. The Princesses Catherine, Bamba and their toddler sister Sophia were protected from the worst of the tensions by Miss Date, and the thick walls of the nursery.
Though bankruptcy loomed, Duleep defiantly paraded his children in front of a constant stream of aristocratic visitors throughout 1877 and 1878, as if he had not a care in the world. The Prince of Wales continued to visit, as did the Lords Huntingdon, Walsingham and de Grey, and the Maharani hosted ladies’ tennis parties, entertaining the likes of the Duchess of Atholl and the Ladies Fitzroy and Leicester. Photographs record tableaux of richly adorned and powerful guests posing in front of the main doors of Elveden Hall, the little Duleep Singh princes and princesses sitting cross-legged in front of them. Though Bamba said nothing, she wore her stress like a mask. In faded photographs, the Maharani sits awkwardly at the centre, casting forlorn looks at her husband behind the camera. Oblivious to his wife’s unhappiness, Duleep seemed to believe that his photographs were a clear message to the watching world: his family remained at the apex of society, regardless of being chased by creditors.
The children too look awkward and out of place in almost all of these photographs, their brown faces and bodies at odds with the country jackets and starched lace petticoats. The boys’ jet black hair had been allowed to grow until it was almost as long as their sisters’, and left untied it flowed all the way down their backs. This is how Queen Victoria liked the children to be. In August 1878 she wrote to Duleep, asking after his ‘dear children’ and requesting a new picture of her godson Victor: ‘I hope he still has his beautiful hair?’23 There was an irony in her desire, for in India such long hair on a boy would have denoted a commitment to the very Sikh religion Duleep had forsaken.
In the same letter, the Queen also gently chided the Maharajah for his intemperate spending: ‘You know how deep an interest I have ever taken in you, and how much I feel for the trying position in which you were and are placed by circumstances over which you had no control – but as an old friend, excuse me for saying that I think you are considered a little inclined to extravagance which may act unfavourably on the settlement of your affairs.’24 Duleep heeded the Queen’s warning only reluctantly. For now, he cut back on his expensive diversions in London, his clubs, the Garrick and the Marlborough, and some of his more superfluous friends, and he tried to spend more time in the country with his family. In August 1879, Bamba gave birth to her sixth and final child, a son. In line with his new attempts to defer to the Queen, the boy was named Prince Albert Edward Duleep Singh in honour of the late Prince Consort. To his family, the child would be known as Edward. To Sophia, who would love him most of all, he would be ‘Eddie’.
4
The Fall
Not only were Sophia and Edward deeply fond of each other, they also bore a strong resemblance. Edward had large soulful eyes, which turned down at the corners. Like Sophia he was quiet and shy, although altogether more serious. He had, like his sister, a broad, square forehead and a long aquiline nose, although hers was slightly crooked at the bridge. Both children had thin, downturned mouths, which could make them look deeply unhappy, even when they were not. In Edward’s case, his eyelids did not help. Heavy and hooded, they gave him a perpetual look of world-weariness. From the beginning the prince was thin and physically fragile, but when Edward caught up with his sister’s height, the two looked almost like twins. The most marked difference came in their pigmentation, for Edward had dark brown skin, while Sophia was much fairer.
Despite the arrival of her sixth child, by the end of 1879 it had become clear to Bamba that she was trapped in a sham of a marriage. For the first few months of Edward’s life the Maharajah was almost entirely absent from home. He took to spending most of his time, and money, in London, leaving Maharani Bamba isolated and downcast in the countryside. Her misery only increased when the salacious gossip from the capital made its way as far as remote Elveden. Rumour had it that not only had the Maharajah’s gambling taken on ruinous proportions, but he was also very publicly cheating on his wife.
In fact, Duleep had been unfaithful throughout his marriage, though these were usually low-key dalliances involving housemaids, or women from the local villages who were no more tempted to trumpet their affairs than he. These indiscretions remained in the shadows, allowing the Maharani the façade of a happy marriage. If any children resulted from these liaisons, Duleep would pay for their education, even going as far as to employ some of his offspring on his estate. It was not until Sophia was older that she would notice that there were various youths working around Elveden with dark skin and features not dissimilar to her own. A few of his illegitimate children even had ‘Singh’ noted as middle names on their birth certificates. One, Kate Singh, was born in the nearby Norfolk parish of Swaffham in 1876, the same year as Sophia’s birth, and grew up to be a domestic parlour maid.
After the birth of Prince Edward, the Maharajah made no attempt to hide his infidelities. He was regularly seen in the company of Polly Ash, a singer and danseuse at the Royal Alhambra Palace in Leicester Square, a place known for its ‘reckless liberality’ and ‘where wantons expose their shame’. Numerous wealthy men would come nightly for the theatre’s attractions – not the shows themselves, but the barely clad young dancers. A huge basement canteen was open to the public, and the richer patrons mixed with the performers while the champagne flowed. It was not unusual for young women to seek out the most generous benefactors and leave with them at the end of the night. It was here that the Maharajah first met Polly and became
transfixed, to the extent that he was soon to be seen escorting Miss Ash around town in the full glare of public attention.
Queen Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, was alarmed by the very public poor conduct of the Maharajah, and by the amount of India Office money he was prepared to lavish on his dancing girl. Duleep submitted bills for expensive hotel rooms and perfumes, and even badgered the government to pay Polly Ash a stipend of £2,000 a year. Ponsonby wrote to the Prince of Wales hoping that, despite his own playboy reputation, the heir to the throne might prevail on his friend to see sense. But no amount of persuasion could sway the Maharajah from his indulgence of his mistress. Duleep continued to strut about London with Polly and a bevy of Alhambra regulars in tow. The spectacle led the press to mock the Maharajah openly in caricature and editorials. By 1880, Duleep presented an easy target. He was no longer the beautiful boy whom Victoria held up as ‘a bright example to all Indian Princes, for he is thoroughly good and amiable, and most anxious to improve himself’.1 The youth who had exuded such beauty and nobility was now a stout, balding, middle-aged man who spent almost every night at the Alhambra, ‘graciously accepting the homage of houris in the green room, and distributing 9-carat gimcracks with Oriental lavishness’.2 The Maharajah was making a laughing stock of himself, and his family, and never more so than when he was caught waving small jewels above the heads of the Alhambra throng crying out, ‘What nice little girl is going to have this?’3