White Mughals (15 page)

For all this, the marriage between the Handsome Colonel and Munro’s beautiful daughter was apparently a passionate one, and within two years Katherine had given the Colonel two sons, George, born on 15 July 1763, and James Achilles, born thirteen months later, on 22 August 1764. Both were baptised in St Mary’s Church in the Fort of Madras, where Katherine and the Colonel had been married. But when James Achilles was eighteen months old, his mother died of a sudden fever aged only twenty-two, despite—or perhaps partly because of—the ministrations of her father. James and George must presumably have been brought up by Indian
ayahs
until their father returned home to England three years later. Never one to miss an amorous opportunity, the Handsome Colonel fathered yet another illegitimate child—this time a daughter—on the boat home in a brief affair with a Mrs Perrein,
^af
the wife of a Portuguese Jewish mercenary in the service of the Nawabs of the Arcot.
¹²

There is a gap in the archives concerning the period James and George spent in England as boys. While their father set off East again, this time to command Fort Marlborough in Sumatra, all that is known is that the two brothers were briefly sent to Eton, where they must have been younger contemporaries of Richard Wellesley, and that their schooling was finished off in ‘various seminaries’ in France.
^ag
In between terms, they spent the holidays with their Kirkpatrick grandfather at Hollydale near Bromley in Kent. Their grandfather had by now sold his Carolina plantations, abandoned his Jacobite sympathies, and belatedly—and somewhat unsuccessfully—embarked on the life of an author: his political works were judged ‘very dull’,
¹³
and his most notable production was a slim volume of medical research entitled
Putrifaction.
In March 1779, at the age of fifteen, after just eleven years in Europe, James returned to India, the land of his birth. As he had done with James’s elder half-brother, the Handsome Colonel had obtained for him an East India Company cadetship, based in Madras.

It was inevitable now that William and James would meet. Lady Strachey had in her possession the Handsome Colonel’s diaries and letter books, all now lost, which gave an indication of the manner in which it happened. She reported her discovery in a letter to a relation:

Despite the ten-year gap in their ages and the strangeness of their meeting, which seems to have taken place in 1784 or 1785, the two half-brothers immediately became close. Judging from the tenor of their often moving and heartfelt letters, the relationship seems to have given a much-needed emotional prop to both men. Of the two, William was the senior, but he seems also to have been the more vulnerable and insecure; hardly surprising perhaps when the loveless and institutionalised nature of his childhood is taken into account.

A strong impression of William at the beginning of his career—a lonely and melancholy teenager washed up in India without money, backers or patrons—survives in the letters he wrote throughout the 1770s and eighties to his great friend John Kennaway.
¹⁵
Kennaway was a grammar-school boy, the son of an Exeter merchant who came out to India in 1772 with his brother after being presented with a cadetship each by their East India Company cousin, Richard Palk. The brothers had nearly died on arrival when their ship was wrecked in the mouth of the Ganges, and they ‘presented themselves to Governor Hastings with nothing but the clothes on their backs’.
¹⁶
Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Kennaways were well-connected, and John quickly overtook William Kirkpatrick—who was a year his senior—in the race for preferment. This did not get in the way of their friendship, however, and letters William wrote to Kennaway are surprisingly deeply felt.

In the first, dated 18 January 1774, Kirkpatrick writes warmly that he is ‘pleased with the proof you have given me of your affection … and I do assure you I regretted your absence as much as my amiable friend did mine’. A year later, the tone is more emotional: ‘
You
know yourself and (I hope)
me
too well to doubt the sincerity of my affection for you,’ he writes. By 1777, the tone has become close to the romantic: ‘I am dull, stupid and melancholy,’ writes an anguished Kirkpatrick. ‘In a word I am low spirited … [and] I have been low spirited ever since I left you: I am still low spirited: and low spirited shall I continue.’ He talks of ‘all I have suffered since my separation from you’, and how ‘my promised bliss’ has been snatched from him by Kennaway’s departure.

Kirkpatrick finally declares himself to Kennaway in a letter of the period which is dated only ‘12 Dec’. The two boys have had a tiff, and Kirkpatrick sits up late writing to his friend attempting to explain his feelings:

It is difficult to know how to interpret these tortured letters, given that at the same time as he was writing them, William was living with an Indian women, Dhoolaury Bibi, by whom he fathered two Anglo-Indian children, and with whom he maintained a relationship until the end of his life, despite being married to an Englishwoman—Maria Pawson—for twelve years in the middle. There is no evidence that Kirkpatrick had any sort of physical relationship with Kennaway, and it is perfectly possible—even probable—that the boys’ romantic friendship was entirely platonic; but equally the possibility must remain that part of William’s melancholy came from suppressing an unresolved and apparently unconsummated bisexuality.
^ah

In 1784, after thirteen years in India, William returned to England to consult doctors and recover his health. He brought with him his two Anglo-Indian children, Robert and Cecilia, then aged seven and four, whom he placed in the care of the Handsome Colonel. The Colonel had recently retired from Sumatra to Hollydale, where James and George had been brought up, but which William had apparently never seen. Though his father agreed to take in the children, the meeting between father and son was not a success: ‘I found my father and all my other connections in perfect health,’ William wrote to Kennaway from London, ‘but I was so unhappy as not to find the former in that temper of mind necessary to his own and my felicity. Disappointments and other accidents of fortune not merited by him, have so far formed his disposition that, did nothing else make my speedy return to India proper, that consideration alone would render my continuance in this country exceedingly unpleasant.’

In stark contrast to the pain of visiting his father, William spent a happy month with Kennaway’s family in Exeter, writing to his friend that he would ‘reserve the history of my visit, and my account of the family, for the happy moment when I shall again have the pleasure of embracing my dear Jack. Suffice it for the present to inform you that I passed near a month among them with a satisfaction that nothing but your presence could have increased.’ Nevertheless, the visit to England brought home to William as nothing else the constraints under which he was forced to live. In India his talents and position had gradually brought him status and respect; but in England he was no one, still the unacknowledged and illegitimate son of a rakish nabob. More to the point he was poor. In India the friends he had made were of a different class and a different economic bracket to him. Visiting the Kennaways, he realised suddenly the impossibility of ever returning to England, unless he were first to make his fortune. In a letter to Kennaway he tried to explain to his friend how he felt:

William’s letters are invariably written with great grace and beauty, and with numerous classical and Oriental literary allusions: with Kennaway in particular he frequently discusses Persian literature, the rival translations of Hafiz, and the beauties of the
Shahnama.
He worked hard at perfecting his Persian, Bengali and Hindustani; but throughout the entire correspondence, and despite all his Orientalist learning, there is little feeling for India evident in William’s letters.
^ai

Indeed, in some quarters William Kirkpatrick had already got a reputation for haughtiness towards Indians. The Indophile General William Palmer, who had been Warren Hastings’ Military Secretary, then Resident in Lucknow, was alarmed when he heard in November 1786 that William Kirkpatrick had been made Resident at the camp of the Maratha leader, Mahadji Scindia. ‘I am suprized that Kirkpatrick should have sought that Station,’ wrote Palmer. ‘His mind is strongly prejudiced against India.’
¹⁸

As General Palmer had predicted, William Kirkpatrick’s tenure as Resident at the court of Scindia was not a success, and for exactly the reasons he had foreseen. Kirkpatrick’s childhood made him especially sensitive to anything that might appear a slight. In a letter written by the then Resident, James Anderson, to William when the news of his posting was made public, William was warned that the Maratha’s Hindu peasant manners were very different from those of the courtly Muslim Mughals with whom he had been used to dealing:

The warning, however, fell on deaf ears. Within a month of his arrival at Delhi, where Scindia was then encamped, William was complaining to the Governor General Lord Cornwallis that Scindia and his court were rude and neglectful: ‘his general object [is to subject] the English Resident at his Durbar [court] to humiliating situations’. Scindia in turn formally complained to Calcutta of William’s arrogance and haughtiness.

Cornwallis was planning a war against Tipu Sultan, and had no wish at that moment to see any sort of hostilities break out between the Company and the Marathas; rather he wished to conclude some sort of defensive alliance with them. So he wrote back to William saying that he was ‘exceedingly sorry to hear of a coldness between you and Scindia’, and instructed him to live ‘on a footing of friendship and good humour’ with the Maratha durbar. At the end of the letter he made his position even more frank: ‘Your good sense will immediately point out to you the substance and the intention of this dispatch. I wish to avoid a public breach with Scindia, and therefore should he, from any motives whatever, continue the slights and inattentions of which you complain … you will treat them as much as possible as matters of personal offence only.’
²⁰

The letter could not have been more clearly expressed; but it was already too late. Things had reached a head on 24 January 1787. One of William’s escort had gone to swim in the Jumna, where he met a
dhobi
(a laundryman) who was cleaning the clothes of Scindia’s son-in-law on the ghats. The sepoy demanded that the washerman—an untouchable—move away while he took his swim. The washerman refused to do so. He was promptly attacked by the sepoy, who beat him over the head with a
lathi
(truncheon or stick). A troop of Marathas happened to be passing by and joined in on the side of the
dhobi,
leaving the sepoy badly wounded. The incident escalated, and by the afternoon, after several soldiers on either side had been severely wounded, William was forced to leave his quarters in a crumbling palace in Old Delhi for his own safety. From a temporary camp in the garden of Safdarjung’s tomb, six miles outside the city, he demanded that the offenders should be arrested and that there should be a formal apology. None was forthcoming.