12
According to Alex Palmer, a manuscript called the ‘Cayon Diary’ bound with the parish register of Cayon on St Kitts refers to Sarah staying on in the island after William’s departure. See ‘The Palmer Family’, op. cit., p.7 n2. For John Palmer’s letter to his mother, see Palmer Papers, Bodleian Library, Ms Eng Lit C83, p.1, Benares, 16 December 1782. For Sarah in Greenwich, and William’s attempts to get David Anderson to send her some money, see Anderson Papers, BL Add Mss 45,427, p.203, March 1792, Gualiar.
13
Palmer is frequently stated to have married Fyze according to Muslim law—for example by Count Edouard de Warren in
L’Inde Anglaise en 1843
(Paris, 1845), where he says that the General married his wife, ‘a well-born Indian lady … according to the Koran [i.e. the rites of her religion]’, as is confirmed by Palmer family tradition: see letter from Palmer’s great-granddaughter, Mrs Hester Eiloart, of 15 September 1927, OIOC L/R/7/49). Given Fyze’s social status this would in turn imply that, like James Kirkpatrick, Palmer converted to Islam, which apart from anything else would have removed the obstacle of his previous marriage: Muslims are of course allowed up to four wives. But unlike the case of Kirkpatrick there is no firm evidence either for a conversion or a Muslim marriage, and in Palmer’s will, Fyze is merely referred to as ‘Beby Fize Buksh Saheb a Begum, who has been my affectionate friend & companion during a period of more than thirty five years’ (Bengal Wills 1816, OIOC L/AG/34/29/28, p.297). This formulation, however, leaves the question open, and certainly does not disprove a Muslim marriage: James Kirkpatrick used a similar one in his will to describe Khair un-Nissa, despite having been legally married in a Muslim ceremony, because—according to his friend and Assistant Henry Russell—he was worried that English law would not recognise the Muslim marriage, and he did not wish to endanger his legacy to his children. (See letter from Henry Russell to his brother Charles, Swallowfield, 30 March 1848, in the private archive of James Kirkpatrick’s descendants.) It is quite possible that Palmer described Fyze in this way for the same reason.
14
Young,
Fountain of Elephants
, op. cit., pp.99-100. Young quotes from some letters he found in the Chambéry archives, some of which appear to have disappeared since his trawl through the archive in the 1950s. I certainly could not find the one which refers to ‘the Persian Colonel’, but did find legal documents from Nur Begum’s time in Britain which repeatedly state that she was ‘of Delhi’. Although Fyze was later made a Begum by the Emperor, there is no contemporary evidence that she was ‘a member of the Delhi Royal House’, as her grandson-in-law Philip Meadows Taylor seemed to believe.
15
There has long been confusion over the name of Fyze’s sister and de Boigne’s wife. In an article in
Bengal Past and Present
(Vol. XLIII, p.150), Sir Judunath Sarkar suggested that as she took the name Helena when she later converted to Christianity, she might originally have had some similar Muslim name such as Halima. Since then the name Halima has entered the literature as if it were fact, most recently in Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s fascinating piece on her in her
Engaging Scoundrels
, op. cit., pp.88-93. In actual fact her name was Nur Begum, as was recorded by Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who writes of his meeting with her in London in
The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan
, op. cit., pp.198-200: ‘Noor Begum who accompanied General de Boigne from India … was dressed in the English fashion, and looked remarkably well. She was much pleased with my visit, and requested me to take charge of a letter for her mother, who resides at Lucknow.’
16
Anderson Papers, BL Add Mss 45,427, p.198v, undated but c.1781.
17
Ibid., p.146, 3 May 1783.
18
Ibid., p.180, 3 October 1784.
20
For details of the court costume of this period see Ritu Kumar,
Costumes and Textiles of Royal India
(London, 1998). Kumar’s book is much the best source for the clothing of the period, but she severely underestimates the degree of intermarriage and cultural cross-dressing that went on.
21
As with much else concerning Palmer’s marriage, there has been a great deal of scholarly controversy about the identity of the figures in the picture. A letter written by Palmer’s great-great-granddaughter, M.P. Hanley ‘of Assam’, now in the India Office Library, maintains that ‘the General was a ‘’bad old man” and had two wives, the first being the Princess Fyzun Nissa of Delhi, the mother of William Palmer of Hyderabad and the second a princess of Oudh. I have this information from Mr. Charles Palmer who tells me he got it from Miss Meadows Taylor who edited Meadows Taylor’s
Story of My Life
’ (OIOC, L/R/7/49). This version of events was followed by Mildred Archer in her
India and British Portraiture
, op. cit., pp.281-6, who thought that the figure kneeling to Palmer’s left must be the ‘Oudh Princess’, and that she was ‘looking ardently at Palmer and leaning against his knee while he for his part holds her hand’ (although this is clearly not the case if you look carefully at the unfinished painting, and represents an almost unique case of the usually super-scrupulous Mrs Archer failing to look closely at a picture: Nur is in fact neither looking at Palmer nor holding his hand). Archer’s reading of the picture has been blindly followed by Beth Toibin in
Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Painting
(Duke, 1999), pp.113-14. The story seems however to have got garbled in the retelling, for while Fyze and her sister appear frequently in Palmer’s letters and will, there is never a single mention of a second Indian wife or concubine—though the General did in fact have a second wife, Sarah Hazell, in St Kitts, and here must lie the origin of the confused story. Palmer’s ‘Begum of Oudh’ referred to in a
Times
marriage announcement of 19 February 1925 (taken out by a proud great-grandson of the Begum who was getting married), which Archer believed to be substantiating evidence for a second Indian wife, was of course Fyze herself, who though born in Delhi had long been a Lucknow resident. The beautiful bejewelled figure kneeling beside Palmer in the picture must presumably be Nur Begum, as Mrs Hester Eiloart, another great-granddaughter (who sold the picture to the India Office), always maintained, and as Durba Ghosh also concluded in her investigation of the picture (see ‘Colonial Companions’, op. cit., p.97, n36). This is also the view of the current Director of the Prints and Drawings Section in the India Office, Dr Jerry Losty, who, just to add to the confusion, has recently re-attributed the picture to the painter Johan Zoffany. (Mildred Archer believed it to be the work of Francesco Renaldi: see her
India and British Portraiture
, op. cit., p.282, and ‘Renaldi and India: A Romantic Encounter’, in
Apollo
, Vol. 104, July- September 1976, pp.98-105.) The well-dressed female figure standing on the extreme right of the picture must presumably be another of Fyze’s sisters.
22
De Boigne archive, Chambéry, letters from William Palmer to Benoît de Boigne, 13 March 1790; Ogeine, 23 April 1792; and ‘Friday Evening’ (undated but c.1785).
23
De Boigne archive, Chambéry,
arzee
from the Lady Faiz un-Nissa.
24
Dennis Kincaid,
British Social Life in India 1608-1937
(London, 1938).
25
Mulka Begum was also the Mughal Emperor’s niece. See Narindar Saroop,
A Squire of Hindustan
(London, 1983), p.149.
26
When she visited the Nawab’s harem, Fanny Parkes met one of the Angrezi Begums and writes in detail about her in
Wanderings of a Pilgrim
, op. cit.
27
Mrs B. Meer Hassan Ali,
Observations on the Mussulmauns of India Descriptive of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions Made During Twelve Years Residence in their Immediate Society
(London, 1832).
28
See the Introduction by W. Crooke to the 1917 Oxford University Press (OUP) edition, p.xv.
29
De Boigne archive, Chambéry, ‘Mrs Begum’s London accounts’.
30
Alam and Alavi,
A European Experience of the Mughal Orient
, op. cit., esp. pp.69-71.
31
Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,178, Vol. XLVII, 1801-02, 10 October 1802, pp.277-8, William Palmer to Hastings.
32
Ibid., 4 December 1802, pp.314-19.
33
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/12, p.30, 5 May 1800.
34
For example ibid., p.179, 16 September 1801, William Palmer to James Kirkpatrick.
35
This had stated that the land handed over was, as William Palmer reported to Warren Hastings, ‘a full and complete equivalent and discharge, whether revenue should exceed or fall short of the estimate, in either of which events neither party was to make any demand on the other’. Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,178, Vol. XLVII, 1801-02, 10 July 1801, pp.61-3.
37
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.70, 23 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
38
Ibid., p.113, 4 August 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
39
See Moon, op. cit., p.305, and Butler, op. cit., pp.242-51.
40
OIC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.2, 2 December 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
41
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.58, 7 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
42
Ibid., p.17, 26 January, William Palmer to James Kirkpatrick.
43
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.13, 4 January 1802, and p.14, 10 January 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
44
Ibid., p.26, 1 February 1802, James Kirkpatrick to John Tulloch.
45
For Fyze’s adoption by the Emperor and her title see OIOC, Persian Mss, IO 4440.
46
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/83, pp.19-24, 4 January 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Lord Wellesley.
47
Ibid., p.152, 6 September 1801, and p.166, 21 September 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
48
Ibid., p.152, 6 September, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
49
Ibid., p.166, 21 September 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
50
Thomas Sydenham, quoted in Anon.,
Some Notes on the Hyderabad Residency Collected from Original Records in the Residency Office
(Hyderabad, c.1880), p.3.
51
Mackintosh,
Memoirs
, op. cit., Vol. 1, p.511.
52
Julian James Cotton, ‘Kitty Kirkpatrick’,
Calcutta Review
, April 1899, p.243.
53
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.35, 5 April 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
54
Ibid., p.39, 17 April 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick. For William Thackeray in Madras see Sir William Hunter,
The Thackerays in India
(London, 1897), pp.111-40. This odd little book also contains (on p.174) an interesting mention of James’s now-vanished grave in South Park Street Cemetery, as he was buried adjacent to the grave of Richmond Thackeray, the father of the novelist.
55
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.40, 22 April 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
56
Ibid., p.58, 7 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
57
Ibid., p.44, 4 May 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
58
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/25, p.21, 20 June 1801, Lord Wellesley to William Kirkpatrick.
59
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.62, 11 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
60
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/55, p.3, 6 December 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
61
There is a wonderful account of the two young men’s trip written by Edward’s descendant, Barbara Strachey, in
The Strachey Line: An English Family in America, India and at home from 1570 to 1902
(London, 1985), pp.100-5. The diaries of both survive in the India Office Library, though Elphinstone’s writing is so scruffy as to be partly illegible. Mountstuart Elphinstone’s is in Mss Eur F88 Box13/16[b], and Edward Strachey’s in Mss Eur F128/196.
62
OIOC, Edward Strachey’s Diary, Mss Eur F128/196, pp.16-20.
63
OIOC, Mss Eur F88 Box13/16[b], entry for 14 September 1801.
64
OIOC, Edward Strachey’s Diary, Mss Eur F128/196, p.33.
66
OIOC, Mss Eur F88 Box13/16[b], entry for 13 September 1801.
67
OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.92, 16 October 1802, James Kirkpatrick to to Sir John Kennaway.
68
Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales’, op. cit., pp.180-1, 184.
69
OIOC, Mss Eur F88 Box 13/16[b], entry for 22 August 1801.
70
Ibid., entry for 23 August 1801.
71
Ibid., entry for 15 November 1801.
72
Khan,
Gulzar i-Asafiya
, p.560.
74
For this practice in Lucknow see Fisher, ‘Women and the Feminine … ’, op. cit., p.507.
75
Khan,
Gulzar i-Asafiya
, p.588.
76
For this tilework, which has recently been drastically ‘renovated’ by the Archaeological Survey of India in hideous Disney colours, see the excellent description in Michell and Zebrowski,
The New Cambridge History of India 1.7: Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates
(Cambridge, 1999), p.138.
77
Husain,
Scent in the Islamic Garden
, op. cit., p.31.
78
Kausar, op. cit., p.224.