Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Her relations with Gladstone never improved, and after Ponsonby was put in the unenviable position of having to convey one of her most marked rebukes to him, he had to advise Gladstone to reply direct to the Queen rather than to Ponsonby himself as her private secretary, as he had no desire to put his ‘finger in between two iron clads colliding’.42 His attitude to the role of the sovereign in the constitution remained that of a Whig a hundred years previously. Though he devoted much of his life to serving the Queen, he always retained a down-to-earth perspective on the splendour and institution of royalty and monarchy. The lack of showiness of the British monarchy, when compared with the opulence of some European courts, clearly appealed to him.

  NINE

  ‘A sort of pet’

  In June 1887, the year she celebrated her golden jubilee, Queen Victoria acquired the first of her Indian servants. To mark her fifty years on the throne, Sir John Tyler, governor of the northwest provinces in India, recruited two Indians specifically to come to England as her servants. One, Abdul Karim, was to play an increasingly important and highly contentious part in her life, and was in fact destined to remain in her service until her death. Twenty-four years old at the time of his appointment, slim and intelligent, he entered her service at the same time as his colleague Mohammed Bukhsh. At first she had them stand behind her chair at breakfast, as she ate a boiled egg in a gold eggcup with a gold spoon.

  Abdul Karim, she thought, looked so distinguished with his black beard and dark eyes, and she decided that he was destined for greater things. Something in his personality evidently made a deep impression on her. Perhaps he had exceptional powers as a raconteur, in his telling her stories of India and fluently answering her questions about the religions, customs and traditions of her Indian subjects. To the end of her days, it would always be a source of major disappointment to her that she never managed to make the journey to her Indian empire, and there can be little doubt that Abdul Karim provided her with the next best thing in a suitable personal connection to this exciting yet unknown world. Her letters suggest that she had some fascinating discussions with him, embracing philosophy, politics and practical matters. Above all, he appealed to her as a true man of the people, as opposed to a representative of the viceroy’s court, who could be guaranteed to tell her something of the essence of the sub-continent, rather than the official line.

  Though Karim was barely literate, the Queen soon raised him from the rank of khitmagar (waiter) to munshi (secretary). Instead of cooking her curries, he progressed to giving her lessons in Hindustani. He was relieved of such menial tasks as waiting at table, and all photographs which had been taken of him handing dishes to the Queen were soon destroyed as being beneath his dignity.

  Within a few months, the Queen was employing more Indian servants, and she made it clear that Karim must be treated as the most important among them. He was put in charge of all the other Indians in her employ, and he soon graduated to Indian Secretary, being given his own office and a staff of clerks. From looking after the Queen’s letters and papers, he moved on to commenting on those concerning India and helping to compose answers. If petitions from India needed nothing more than a formal refusal, she would hand them straight to him. In 1889, Karim was given John Brown’s old room at Balmoral. That same year, the Queen took him to stay overnight at Glassalt Shiel, the little lodge on Lock Muick in which she had once sworn she would never sleep again after the death of Brown.

  This last great emotional attachment of the Queen’s life was in some ways her most blinkered. She believed everything Karim told her. He assured her that his father, Dr Mohammed Waziruddin, was a surgeon-general in the Indian Army in Agra. His family were all well-respected people who occupied important positions in government service, he said, and he himself had been a highly paid clerk in Agra before coming to England. She found his Hindustani lessons rewarding and regarded him as a very strict but capable master, and his continuous presence was a great comfort to her.

  In 1890 the Munshi returned briefly to India on leave. The Queen asked Lord Lansdowne, the Viceroy of India, to obtain a grant of land for him in Agra, as well as a place for him and his father at the forthcoming Durbar, the Indian princes’ state reception given in the Queen’s honour. Notwithstanding considerable jealousy on the part of other Indians, Lansdowne settled the land grant and found room for him at the Durbar, but explained he could do nothing for the Munshi’s father, whose low earnings automatically excluded him from attending the ceremony. This was as good as proof that Dr Waziruddin’s status was less grand than his son claimed, but the Queen continued to believe her Munshi. To Dr Reid’s amazement, she endorsed Karim’s request for a large quantity of drugs to be sent to his father, and when the doctor disclaimed all responsibility for a consignment which he estimated as having the potential to kill up to 15,000 adults, the Queen requested that the drugs should be ordered through a British chemist in India and the bill be sent to her.

  The Munshi’s father was not the only one of his relations to benefit from the Queen’s generosity. Before coming to England, Karim had married, and his wife, plus various female relations, followed him to Britain, settling in the three homes which the Queen had allotted to the Munshi – Frogmore Cottage at Windsor, Arthur Cottage at Osborne and the specially built Karim Cottage at Balmoral. They and others from their extended family lived quietly, playing no role in their increasingly important and self-important relative’s career. Whether there was one wife or more was open to question, as Dr Reid maintained that whenever he was asked to attend ‘Mrs Abdul Karim’, who (as Indian custom prescribed) always remained fully clothed and veiled, a different tongue was put out for him to examine. Life within these self-contained compounds was lived along strict Islamic lines, with animals slaughtered according to religious rites.

  The existence of the Munshi’s exotic ménage, a stone’s-throw from the Queen’s own residences, struck visitors as extremely curious. Lady-in-waiting Marie Mallet wrote of going to see the Munshi’s wife, whom she found ‘fat and not uncomely, a delicate shade of chocolate and gorgeously attired, rings on her fingers, rings in her nose, a pocket mirror set in turquoises on her thumb and every feasible part of her person hung with chains and bracelets and ear-rings, a rose-pink veil on her head bordered with heavy gold and splendid silk and satin swathings round her person. She speaks English in a limited manner and declared she likes the cold. But the house surrounded by a twenty-foot palisade, the white figure emerging silently from a near chamber, all seemed so un-English, so essentially Oriental.’1

  The Munshi’s name began to appear not only in the Court Circular, but also in newspapers and magazines. Any attempt on the part of the royal household to belittle him by fobbing him off with a hired carriage, by seating him among the dressers at theatrical performances or by refusing to allow him use of the billiard room immediately incurred the Queen’s wrath as soon as she was informed. The other Indian servants were jealous of his privileged position, but the Queen always took his side. Whether Abdul Karim was in the wrong or not, and his high-handed attitude meant he frequently was at fault, Her Majesty would never hear a word against him. Any Indian who quarrelled with the Munshi was liable to find himself being sent back to the Asiatic sub-continent almost at once.

  Once, when the Munshi was suffering from a carbuncle on his neck, the Queen became very worried. She would visit Karim’s sick-room several times a day, where she would examine his neck, smooth his pillows, ‘stroke his hand’ and have her boxes brought in so as to allow her to spend more time in his company. Suspecting that Reid was not doing enough for this ‘dear good young man’, the Queen suggested that he get a second opinion. The capable Reid had no need of a second opinion, and once the abscess had been opened, the Munshi quickly recovered.

  If the royal household had resented John Brown’s presence, they soon decided for themselves that the Munshi was far worse. Racism and snobbery both help to explain this aversion to him, for only if an Indian was a pr
ince would the ladies and gentlemen of Queen Victoria’s court consider treating him as an equal. Even liberals like Ponsonby referred disparagingly to ‘the Black Brigade’. The Queen had been obliged to give instructions that the Indians in her employ must never be referred to as ‘black men’, and even Lord Salisbury had to apologise for doing so.

  At the Braemar games in 1890 the Queen’s third son, Arthur, Duke of Connaught, was so angered at seeing the Munshi, ‘a very conspicuous figure, among the gentry’, that he complained of his presence to Ponsonby. The secretary had long since become an expert in the handling of these delicate situations and told him that Abdul stood where he was on the orders of the Queen. Perhaps it would be better, he suggested, to mention it directly to Her Majesty himself. ‘This entirely shut him up.’2 As Ponsonby had foreseen, Queen Victoria’s favourite son thought better of it.

  Any speculation on the Munshi’s humble origins, no matter how well justified, infuriated the Queen. But the household’s antipathy towards the Munshi was understandable. He undoubtedly misled the Queen about his origins. He would never have been employed, as it was claimed in one press report, in a secretarial capacity by the Nawab of Jawara. Moreover, his father was not a surgeon-general in the Indian Army, or indeed a doctor of any description. He had merely been a hospital assistant, with no medical diploma or qualification that would have secured him a place on a British medical register.

  Refusing to believe this, the Queen instructed Sir Henry Ponsonby’s son Fritz, then on the Viceroy’s staff but soon to become one of Her Majesty’s equerries, to investigate. Fritz Ponsonby duly visited ‘Dr’ Waziruddin and, on reporting to the Queen later that year, explained that Waziruddin was not a surgeon-general but merely ‘an apothecary at the jail’. The Queen flatly rejected young Ponsonby’s story, saying he must have seen the wrong person. Assuming the matter was now closed, Fritz Ponsonby was astonished to discover the extent of the Queen’s anger. Though he was an equerry, he was not invited to dine at the Queen’s table until a year had elapsed. It was no wonder that he shared the household’s resentment of the man who seemed to him to have the status of ‘a sort of pet, like a dog or cat which the Queen will not willingly give up.’3

  Sometimes he who dares wins, and the Munshi’s web of deceit about his family’s origins and father’s achievements had paid off. If he had told the truth, it has been pointed out, he might never have risen to such an exalted position in the royal household at all, especially in view of the attitudes which most English people had towards Indians in the Victorian age.

  Yet this was not the end of the Munshi’s lack of trustworthiness. The Queen was particularly fond of a brooch which had been given to her by her son-in-law the Grand Duke of Hesse. One day she asked for it to be pinned on her shawl by her dresser, Mrs Tuck. When she could not see it and asked where it was, the Queen was assured that the brooch had been pinned on as directed, but despite an extensive search it could not be found. A footman on duty that day suspected that the Munshi’s brother-in-law, Hourmet Ali, had stolen it. The Queen angrily accused the dresser of having lost it.

  A few weeks later it turned up at Wagland’s, a jewellery shop in Windsor, where the proprietor confirmed that an Indian had sold it to him for 6s. When he returned it, the Munshi’s enemies were delighted, convinced that they were about to see the last of him. However, when Mrs Tuck took the brooch and letter to the Queen and reported Hourmet Ali’s involvement, she was furious with dresser and jeweller alike. ‘That is what you British call justice!’4 she shouted. (Her reference to ‘you British’ makes one wonder whether she had suddenly assumed honorary Indian nationality for the purpose.) After talking to the Munshi, she ordered Mrs Tuck not to mention a word of the matter to anyone else. The Munshi’s brotherin-law, she said, would never dream of stealing anything; the Munshi himself had picked up the brooch at the ‘policeman’s box’, and as it was an Indian custom to keep anything one found and say nothing about it, he was only acting in accordance with his national customs.

  What the Queen’s entourage resented more than his race or his class or his dishonesty was his bumptiousness and insufferable self-importance. Even John Brown at his most insolent had never thought of himself as anything more than a privileged royal servant, while the Munshi insisted on being treated as an equal of the gentlemen of the household, and the Queen never failed to support him. Every time she took her annual spring holidays on the Continent, when tension within the household was generally at its greatest, the Munshi’s behaviour caused particular resentment.

  During her stay in Florence in the spring of 1894, it reached epic proportions. Firstly he complained bitterly to the Queen about the distance of his railway carriage from hers in the royal train to Italy. Next he refused to allow any other, less important, Indians to set foot in it, and insisted that the bathroom and lavatory must be reserved for his exclusive use. Once they had arrived in Florence, he persuaded the Queen to issue instructions that he was to drive out in the same carriage as the other gentlemen of the household. He arranged for a display of photographs in a shop window in which his likeness appeared in the centre, surrounded by nine photographs of the Queen. At his behest, she gave orders that his name was to appear more frequently in the newspapers. In case these orders might not be observed, the Munshi prepared his own press release with a photograph of himself in which he was, he instructed, to be made ‘thinner and less dark’, and sent them to the Florence Gazette:

  The Munshi Mohammed Abdul Karim, son of Haji Dr Mohammed Waziruddin an inhabitant of Agra the Cheef City of NWP who left his office in India, and came to England in the service of the Queen Victoria Empress of India in the year 1887.

  He was appointed first for some time as Her Majestys Munshi and Indian Clerk. From 1892 he was appointed as her M’s Indian Secretary. He is belonging to a good and highly respectful Famiely. All is Famiely has been in Govt. Service with high position. His father is still in the service of the Govn. 36 years ago. One brother of his is a city Collector. All the Indian attendants of the Queen are under him and he also wholes different duties to perform in Her Majesty’s Service.5

  During the Queen’s visit to the south of France in March 1895 a newspaper in Nice printed the information that Karim had helped the Queen from her carriage. He was grossly insulted at the suggestion that he had performed any such menial function, and she readily endorsed his efforts to correct this misunderstanding. ‘By telegraphic error it was made to appear that the Munshi assisted the Queen from her carriage on her arrival at Nice, which is of course not the case, as Her Majesty is always assisted by an Indian servant,’ reported the Galignani Messenger dutifully. ‘The Munshi, as a learned man and the Queen’s Indian Secretary and preceptor in Hindustani, is one of the most important personages “aupres de la Reine” having several men under him, and being often privileged to dine with his Royal Mistress and pupil.’6

  The Munshi’s presence was resented not only by the household, but also by Queen Victoria’s three surviving sons, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duke of Connaught. For them, John Brown’s rudeness had been bad enough, but at least he was honest and they never had any reason to distrust him. The same could never be said of the Munshi, and his pomposity was intolerable. Perhaps Brown’s brusque demeanour and lack of manners had not been so bad after all.

  In the spring of 1894 the Queen went to Coburg for the wedding of two of her grandchildren, Grand Duke Ernest Ludwig of Hesse and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The bride’s father was Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and, since the death of his uncle Ernest, now also Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. Inevitably, the Munshi went as part of the Queen’s entourage.

  Shortly after their arrival, the Duke told Sir Henry Ponsonby that under no circumstances would he allow the Munshi into the church for the wedding ceremony. The indignant Queen insisted that he must be allowed to attend; to exclude him would be most hurtful to his feelings. As a compromise, it was arranged that he would be pers
onally conducted into the gallery of the chapel by the son of one of the Prince’s equerries, provided there were no other servants present. On being escorted in, the Munshi caught sight of a couple of grooms and was so incensed at being seated with them that he stormed out of the building before the ceremony had started. He then wrote an outraged letter to the Queen, which was handed to her after the newly wedded couple had gone.

  At first, she was thoroughly upset. Then she sent for the Duke’s private secretary to tell him that she was putting him in charge of everything to do with the Munshi’s ‘position’ for the rest of her stay in Coburg. She realised she could frighten her son’s secretary into obeying her more easily than the experienced Ponsonby, who was doubtless glad to be relieved of such duties. From then on, the Munshi was invited to all functions and was driven about, in splendid isolation, in a royal carriage with a liveried footman on the box.

  By the summer of 1894 Sir Henry Ponsonby seemed much older than his sixty-eight years. The Queen was sometimes less than sympathetic to this most hard-working of men, who had given such faithful service over twenty years and who, it might be said, literally wore himself out as a result. To Dr Reid, she had commented rather coldly in September 1893 that Sir Henry gave her no help in her difficulties with the government, as he lacked backbone and was too placid. ‘He has no courage, but agrees with me, and then is talked over by others and agrees with them. He agrees with everybody.’7 In his position, this most courteous and easy-going of gentlemen would have found his task even more onerous had he not played the diplomat and dared to do otherwise.