Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  Arthur Oliphant dutifully made all the arrangements. He would not be accompanying the princesses and so Miss Schaeffer was chosen to act in loco parentis. Arthur also hired two ladies’ maids to ease their journey, one of whom was the daughter of the old gamekeeper at Elveden, John Mayes. Mayes had been particularly loyal to the family and named his son after Prince Frederick. His daughter, Margaret, had grown up around the Duleep Singh princesses and was just as devoted as her father. With a practical head on her shoulders, she seemed a wise choice.10

  The romance of the European Grand Tour gripped Sophia completely. The women began their travels in Holland which, according to Margaret Mayes, in the meticulous yet discreet diary she kept of the trip, they found flat and boring.11 They then made their way to Germany which they loved. Lina Schaeffer revelled in showing them the very best of the country, and inspired them with tales of history and folklore. Italy enchanted the princesses, and they devoured the delights of Florence, Naples, Milan and Venice. Sophia, in particular, soaked up the culture greedily. Her tutors had taught her about music and art, she had learned to paint and play instruments, but she had never until now felt how these skills might connect to human emotion. When she went to Egypt, the birthplace of her mother, she saw the Sphinx and the Pyramids, became lost in the bazaars and was dazzled by the dance of the dervishes. Such rapid and intense experience of a wider world opened Sophia’s eyes and broadened her horizons. She returned from the Grand Tour with an appetite for adventure which would never leave her. She also returned with no idea where she might live or what she might do with the rest of her life.

  For Queen Victoria and her court, deciding the fate of Sophia and her sisters had been no easy feat. Their incomes had been settled but there was little hope that they would marry well and settle down with an English family. There were no British aristocrats willing to bring Indian brides into their homes, and royal titles and pardons notwithstanding, the Duleep Singh daughters were still thought of by many to be the progeny of a traitor. Cartoons which satirised Duleep’s betrayal of the realm were still circulating. One depicted the Maharajah, wide-mouthed and dressed in a waistcoat embroidered with shamrocks, jigging while waving a shillelagh in the air. A Russian bear played the tune that made him dance.12

  Realising the difficulty, Queen Victoria felt a particular obligation to provide for her goddaughter. Upon her return to England, Sophia was granted a residence at Hampton Court where, on the Crown estates, she, and Catherine and Bamba, could reside for the rest of their lives.

  With its magnificent gardens and maze, Hampton Court had once been the pride of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the most senior cleric in the realm of Henry VIII. Building work began in 1514, and in the years that followed, Wolsey spent a fortune on improvements. However, when the Cardinal failed to persuade his Pope to grant the King a divorce from his first wife, Hampton Court was seized. Later, during the reign of King William III and Queen Mary in 1689, the palace was transformed from its previous Tudor splendour into one of the finest examples of baroque architecture in Britain, perching like a mini Versailles on the banks of the River Thames. Despite becoming the principal residence of the Crown for more than a hundred years, by the 1800s King George III had grown tired of the place. He decided to break with tradition and spurned Hampton Court Palace, instead dividing his time between Kew, Windsor Castle and his newly purchased home, Buckingham Palace.

  As a result, Hampton Court was left empty and available for any whom the monarch wished to reward. The palace’s apartments were divided and given their own separate entrances. These ‘grace-and-favour apartments’ were allocated to those who had done great service to the country. Since most died giving that service, more often than not it was their dependants who came to live at Hampton Court. By the nineteenth century, the rooms were largely inhabited by widows, unmarried sisters and daughters of heroes of the British Empire. Such was the scale of the place that by the mid-1800s as many as 300 residents lived at Hampton Court with a retinue of around 250 servants.13

  When Princess Sophia was granted her grace-and-favour, contemporaries at Hampton Court included a certain Mrs Charlotte Slade,14 cousin of the former Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie, whom Sophia’s father had despised. The apartments were also dotted with relatives of Hodson’s Horse, a fearless cavalry regiment which was regarded as one of the bravest Britain had ever produced. During the 1857 Mutiny, young men carried messages over vast tracts of India, flailing their swords on horseback through areas swarming with hostile natives. Other prospective neighbours included the formidable Lady McPherson,15 widow of the distinguished general Sir Herbert McPherson. He had also served during the Mutiny and was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery during the battle for Lucknow. Another resident was Mrs Constance Barrow,16 daughter of Major Frederick McDonald Birch who had also served and been badly wounded at Lucknow in 1857. The sacrifice of her family had spanned generations and Constance’s husband too had almost lost his life during the siege. Nobody would have blamed her if she were less than comfortable around Indians.

  Sophia, whose father had tried so desperately to raise a Russian army to crush British forces, might have received a frostier reception had it not been for her status as the Queen’s goddaughter. She moved in to her grace-and-favour, and tried to ignore the potential for ill feeling all around her. Sophia’s sisters were not nearly as immune to the whispers. Even though the Lord Chamberlain included Catherine and Bamba’s names on the lease, the prospect of living in such a place, amidst people who despised their father, appalled them. Although they moved their belongings into the grace-and-favour house, they had no intention of staying. Catherine had resolved to live with Miss Schaeffer in Germany and Bamba was desperate to get out of England too, although her sights would be set much further than Europe.

  Sophia’s grace-and-favour, Faraday House, lay opposite the front gates of the palace at 37 Hampton Court Road. A large private property arranged over four floors, it had once been the home of the Master Mason who had presided over the great rebuild of 1689. The Astronomer Royal, Sir Christopher Wren, had owned and lived in a near identical building next door. It was Wren’s vision that had shaped the vast and expensive transformation of the main palace during the eighteenth century. The residences bore the flourishes of men proud of their craft. The façade of number 37 was divided into two distinctive halves. On the left side, five enormous rectangular windows looked out on to the gates of Hampton Court, while on the right, a large canted bay window nestled in cheery red brickwork. Large panes of glass gave it the look of a punchbowl.

  The house had been renamed in the late nineteenth century after Michael Faraday, the great physicist who had lived and died at the address. Faraday had been granted the grace-and-favour in recognition of his work in the fields of electromagnetic induction and electrochemistry. For many years after his death in 1867, the house became a shrine for his acolytes, but even after they stopped coming, it continued to bear his name.

  The ground floor of Faraday House consisted of a dining room and Blue Room, a large formal sitting room which looked out on to the palace. A spacious hallway bisected the house and led to a back sitting room, bathrooms, conservatory, informal drawing room and the more sombre Panel Room, which Sophia quickly converted into her music room, filling it with a variety of instruments and an abundance of sheet music. She was particularly fond of Liszt, Schübert and Ravel, and her regular purchases from Chappell & Co. Ltd, the music publisher on Bond Street, betrayed a romantic sensibility and advanced skill.

  A central staircase twisted like vertebrae from the lower ground floor to the attic. Above, five bedrooms varying in size and grandeur took up the upper two floors. On the lower ground floor modest servants’ quarters led off to a cavernous kitchen. At the side of the house, a narrow path led to a private mews with a four-bedroom cottage at the end of it. These served as quarters for the housekeeper and chauffeur,17 and next door stood a small stable. From 1902 a small garage would also nestle n
ext to the hay bales, large enough to park an elegant Morgan automobile.18

  The ‘motor’, as Sophia referred to it, was more for Bamba’s infrequent use than Sophia’s. Bamba loved the speed and noise of modern automobile travel, whereas her younger sister preferred to ride her horse, a feisty mare called Kathleen, around town.19 The horse, cart and footmen all bore the same Duleep Singh crest designed by Prince Albert many years before, a starred coronet. The motto that went with it, Prodesse quam Conspici, had been dropped by the sisters. Being inconspicuous at Hampton Court was not an option.

  Sophia could never have afforded such a home were it not for her godmother’s generosity. She was expected to pay a token sum of £4 10s20 per year for the house, its gardens and additional mews buildings. In her neatest handwriting, on behalf of all the sisters, Sophia diligently made out cheques in six-monthly instalments to ‘Number 1 Whitehall Place’,21 the Department of Land Revenues. This was the first independent act Sophia had undertaken since leaving the care of Arthur Oliphant. Her second act was to fill the place with animals. Pairs of parakeets and brightly plumed lorikeets brought life and noise to the house, and an assortment of dogs brought mud and warmth. Her brother Victor, who had also developed his love of dogs at Elveden, helped his sister choose the best breeds. His extensive knowledge of raptors, passed down by his father, was less useful.

  Sophia revelled in her new freedom. A high wall around the front of the house kept her far from the prying eyes of those who lived across the road in the palace, but she still had free rein to go where she wished in the grounds. To the dismay of some of the older residents, she took to walking her dogs through Hampton Court Maze.22 Though falling foul of some of the palace’s conventions, Sophia cherished the house’s rich history, and became fiercely protective of one particular tree in the gardens, under which she insisted Professor Faraday must have had many inspirational ideas. When groundskeepers later threatened to cut the tree down the princess launched an energetic but ultimately doomed campaign to save it from the axe.23

  With the question of Sophia’s long-term residence and finances settled, attention was now turned to her introduction to society. The date for Sophia’s coming out had been set for 8 May 1895, almost a year after she moved into Faraday House. Around 150 debutantes would appear before Queen Victoria over three days at a ‘Drawing Room’ at Buckingham Palace. The ceremony coincided with the Season, which ran from April to the start of the grouse-shooting season, ‘the glorious twelfth’ of August.

  For the presentation each girl would dress almost as if it were her wedding day, and having ‘come out’ would find herself eligible for invitations to social functions with the most important families in the realm. Her Majesty’s Drawing Rooms were among the most formal occasions in England’s annual society calendar. Steeped in ceremony, and governed by strict rules of eligibility, the debutantes who attended were almost always young, aristocratic, and in search of a husband. Although Bamba and Catherine were much older than the other ‘debs’, and had no interest (or desire in Catherine’s case) in finding a husband, they entered into the spirit of the occasion for their sister’s sake. Sophia’s presentation at court was the most exciting thing ever to have happened to her. Only those formally presented to the Queen could receive invitations to court functions, parties, dinners and balls, and Sophia wanted to attend them all.

  High-born ladies hoping to come out before the Queen required sponsors – suitable aristocrats who had already been presented at court. They would not only vouch for their debutantes but also become their mentors and chaperones. These distinguished women would teach their young ladies how to behave, and what to expect. The loftier the social rank of the sponsor, the better the debut of the lady in question. Despite the Maharajah’s ignominious fall from grace, there were still a few important families in Britain who retained affection for Duleep Singh and his children. Victor’s friend, the Earl of Carnarvon (who would later go on to discover the tomb of Tutankhamen) was one such. He asked his sister Lady Winifred Gardner24 if she might sponsor Sophia and her sisters for their presentation. Their father had been a former Secretary of State for the Colonies under both Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Derby, and even though she was just a few years older than Bamba, at thirty-one years old Winifred had the pedigree and poise to coach the girls through their big day. (It was ironic that while she schooled Sophia in the importance of finding a suitable man to marry, Winifred’s own daughter would, some thirty years later, wed a man she detested, the writer Evelyn Waugh.)

  While Sophia and her sisters discussed what to wear and how they might fashion their hair, other conversations of greater import were taking place at Buckingham Palace. The Duleep Singh princesses were to be granted access to high society after their debut. However, the question remained to be settled, when it came to the state balls and banquets to which Queen Victoria was keen to invite Sophia, in what order would she enter and where would she sit? Such matters were not trivial, as they signalled the importance of lineage to the world. Lord Henniker dealt with these questions in the days leading up to their presentation:

  It was settled some time ago that they were to be called Princesses, but not Highnesses. This was Her Majesty’s decision, and if I may venture to say so, I think a wise decision. I spoke to a great friend of the family today who may be able to do much for the young people, and he says there is some difficulty as to precedence – how to send them in to dinner etc. etc. I said I thought they would possibly not mind one way or another, but suggested they should go after Duchesses, or greatly distinguished people. If the Queen would give me a hint as to Her Majesty’s wishes, I will see to this being carried out.25

  Yet Lord Henniker was wrong to believe that the sisters ‘would possibly not mind one way or another’.26 As the granddaughters of Ranjit Singh, their relegation behind duchesses rankled with them greatly. They came from a royal family that once held greater dominion and boasted more wealth than many of the monarchies of Europe put together. Even Sophia, usually the most sanguine of her sisters, felt insulted by the decision and would do so all her life. Nevertheless, the princesses were in no position to bargain and even Bamba managed to hold her tongue. In the run-up to their coming out, they had other preoccupations.

  Lady Winifred explained that they would be expected to dress in white gowns, preferably off the shoulder with just the hint of décolletage. Their hair was to be pinned up and crowned by flowing trains up to twelve feet long. Regulation dictated that three white ostrich feathers should be arranged in the hair, as a tribute to the Prince of Wales, and long white gloves and white satin slippers should be worn. Young ladies were also required to hold bouquets of flowers and delicate white fans. The constant fear of tripping gripped each deb like a vice, whilst tightly boned bodices pinched the breath from their bodies. If the weather was hot on the day of a Drawing Room, which traditionally began at three in the afternoon, the whole experience would be an ordeal. Fighting fear, nausea and suffocation, the young debutantes were expected to navigate their way up a long staircase and through the crowded Throne Room where the Queen and her courtiers awaited them. There they had to curtsy.

  A full court curtsy looks much like a ballet plié. With her knees bent, her feet pointing out and her back straight, Sophia practised lowering herself evenly and elegantly to the floor. Unlike ballerinas, however, she would be wearing a heavy and elaborate dress trailed by yards of fabric. Without losing posture, Sophia then had to bend forward from the waist, without listing, and kiss Victoria’s hand. With her hands holding the fan and flowers, and her head dragged back by the weight of her long veil, the princess knew that her every move would be scrutinised by the most powerful courtiers in the realm. The room would be filled with Palace officials and dignitaries, making the air thick with heat. So much could go catastrophically wrong. Tales circulated of former debutantes fainting, or else disgracing themselves with gown slips, fan drops and wobbly curtsies. Sophia had more to worry about than most. As a goddaughter
to the Queen she could not merely withdraw, as the other debs would, after her curtsy. Instead she had to rise gracefully and receive a kiss on both cheeks from Victoria. This honour added to the scrutiny and duration of her appearance. She would then be expected to rise and walk backwards without tripping, elegantly holding the flowers and the fan while a nearby attendant gathered up the ample train and placed it over her left arm.

  Bright sunshine greeted the morning of 8 May, but it was not what anyone would call a lovely day. As Queen Victoria noted in her journal, ‘the atmosphere [was] very thick’,27 and the humidity would only get worse as the day progressed. Unlike the debs, who had almost certainly spent a fretful, sleepless night, the Queen had rested well and had woken early to have a leisurely breakfast with her son Arthur and an assortment of her grandchildren at Buckingham Palace. ‘Georgie’s little boy was brought in. He is a fine strong, big child,’28 she remarked of the future Edward VIII, who was coming up to his first birthday. Despite the presence of her loved ones, the Queen was not in the best of spirits. Her loyal and trusted private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, had been ill for some time and with heavy heart Victoria had decided to replace him with Colonel Arthur Bigge, the future Lord Stamfordham. In addition to her sadness at losing a trusted aide, the Queen was also coming to terms with the loss of a much loved friend. As the London Standard informed its readers on 8 May, ‘The Queen received yesterday, with deep grief, the news of the death of the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe . . . one of her Majesty’s dearest, most valued, and most devoted friends, for over thirty years a Lady of the Bedchamber.’29 Victoria attempted to compose herself by walking among the profusion of flowers in the palace gardens.