Sons, Servants and Statesmen (28 page)

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
:

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 personally 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.

Had Sir Henry’s political views been closer to hers, the Queen would have surely been more accommodating. But old age had made her increasingly dogmatic and set in her ways. Like many elderly people, she disliked change, resented new ways of doing things and was inevitably less patient than before. However, it seems a little strange that she did not properly appreciate and value the impartiality of his dealings with sovereign and ministers, or his desire for peace and his quiet determination to smooth difficulties out. With her failing eyesight she was having difficulties with reading his handwriting, but even others familiar with it observed a change in his handwriting for the worse, and a general appearance of apathy, of increasing forgetfulness, on his part. Like her, his reserves of patience were probably wearing thin with the advancing years.

One detects a note of mild exasperation in his comment of 1893 (probably to Lady Ponsonby) that Her Majesty ‘is full of business and sending ticklers all round, as much as to say “I’m back, so look out!”’
⁸
At what would be his last interview with her late the following year, he was reputed to have said to her face, ‘What a funny little old woman you are.’
⁹
Astonished at being spoken to in this candid way, the Queen told him that he could not be well.

Sadly, she was quite correct. By this time he had probably suffered a series of minor seizures and may have been in the early stages of senile dementia. But nobody was prepared for the paralytic stroke on 7 January 1895 which rendered him unconscious for a while. When he came to, his right arm and leg were completely paralysed, and his speech was incoherent and indistinct. He was confined to his bed, and by May it was evident to all around him that he was most unlikely to recover.

Since the start of Ponsonby’s illness, Reid had become the person in the household whom the Queen and most of her family trusted more than anyone. He had to undertake the painful duty of telling Lady Ponsonby that she would need to resign her husband’s offices for him. The Queen permitted them to stay at Osborne Cottage for the duration of his illness, and it had previously been agreed that Lady Ponsonby could keep the rooms they occupied at St James’s for the rest of her lifetime. However, his salary of £1,700 per annum was reduced to a pension of £1,000 when he became ill.

For the next six months he lingered, a helpless shadow of his former self, until the end came on 21 November. ‘My heart bleeds for you and your children,’ the Queen telegraphed to Lady Ponsonby, ‘and I feel deeply the loss of so faithful and devoted a friend.’
¹⁰
To their daughter Magdalen she wrote that there was one person who felt her beloved father’s loss more than anyone, ‘and whose
gratitude
to him is
very deep
, and that is my good Munshi Abdul Karim. Your dear father was kinder to him than anyone, always befriending him, and the loss to him is, as he says, that of “a
second
Father”. He could not well go to the funeral tomorrow to his regret, but sends a wreath, and I enclose what he wrote on it as I fear in the multitude of similar wreaths this tribute of gratitude might be overlooked.’
¹¹
However, neither wreath nor card had been the Munshi’s doing. The former, Reid assured Magdalen Ponsonby, had been made at Her Majesty’s special command, and she herself had dictated to the Munshi what he was to write on it.

It says something for the enormous workload undertaken by Ponsonby during the previous few years that two members of the household needed promotion to the position of private secretary in order to succeed him. One was Arthur Bigge, the other was Fleetwood Edwards. Bigge found his task very difficult in the early stages, telling Reid that the Queen often found it ‘inconvenient’ to see him, and he could only communicate with her through written messages. Declaring it was impossible to do such a job under these conditions, Reid intervened to persuade Her Majesty that it would be necessary for her to see Bigge regularly.
¹²
Yet Reid was now indispensable as the only male member of the household who could readily approach her, and his importance as a liaison between his sovereign and the outside world was invaluable.

Reid’s faithful service and increasing importance in the household had been rightly recognised. In May 1895 Lord Rosebery had told him he intended to offer him a knighthood on the Queen’s birthday. Reid declined, making as his excuse to Dr Jenner that ‘a simple knighthood’ was ‘rather looked down on here’, and that the fact it was being offered to him showed that he was ‘not put on the same platform as the rest of the people here’, though his services to the Queen were more arduous and responsible than those of most of the men in royal service who had already been similarly honoured.
¹³
His attitude was mildly frowned on by his colleagues, and he evidently reconsidered his views. On 20 June he was knighted at Balmoral. Two years later, the Queen conferred on him a baronetcy as part of the diamond jubilee honours.

The year 1897 was that of the Queen’s diamond jubilee, but for Dr Reid it was also to be remembered, unhappily, as ‘the year of the Munshi’. In January he and Randall Davidson, Bishop of Winchester, had frequent discussions on the subject of the Queen and the Munshi, and he remarked with regret that Her Majesty was ‘off her head on this point’.
¹⁴
He had been asked to treat the Munshi for an unpleasant disease which, he found, was venereal in origin, and ‘had an interesting talk with her’ about it. It was more than likely that she regarded any comments on the possibility of his having such a complaint as a disgraceful slur on the character and morals of her disgracefully persecuted Indian servant.

That spring, the household’s difficulties with the Munshi came to a head. Queen Victoria had planned that she would take her spring holiday at Cimiez, near Nice, and it was beyond question that she intended to take the Munshi with her. This would necessitate his dining with her gentlemen. After previous occasions they had had enough, and they strongly objected to the fact that they would have to take their meals with him in the somewhat cramped accommodation offered by the Hotel Excelsior Regina. The Queen’s personal secretary, Harriet Phipps, was chosen by the less than gallant gentlemen of the household and asked to tell her that if the Munshi was to accompany her to Cimiez, the gentlemen would not be prepared to associate with him.