Farzana Read online

  He also handled her countless charitable donations. These were decidedly ecumenical and included funding the construction of a chapel in Meerut for Irish Catholic soldiers in the British army and an Anglican chapel nearby for native Christians. A generous endowment to the Anglican Church in Calcutta was intended ‘to provide instruction to a number of young men to make them eligible for ordination in the Protestant Episcopal Church’,25 while a donation of 150,000 rupees (nearly £1 million in today’s money) to the Catholic Church in Rome was matched by similar amounts to each of the Catholic churches in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. This extraordinary largesse prompted a gracious letter of thanks from Pope Gregory XVI in which he addressed Farzana as his ‘Beloved Daughter in Christ’.26 Unaware that this was how the Holy Father addressed all Catholic ladies, Farzana regarded it as a title on a par with that of ‘Beloved Daughter’ of the emperor Shah Alam; her gratification was matched by David’s pleasure at being made a Chevalier of the Order of Christ, and probably exceeded by Father Julius Caesar’s delight on learning that the Pope had made him a bishop.

  Meerut had by this time become the most important British military establishment in northern India (and would be the scene of the outbreak of the Great Rebellion or Indian Mutiny in 1857). Its proximity to Sardhana allowed Farzana to carry on entertaining and being entertained by her British friends even after her personal physician Dr Thomas Drever had advised her against making the journey to Delhi. As Godfrey Mundy testified, even in extreme old age her presence could still dominate any gathering.

  Of her hands, arms and feet the octogenarian beauty is still justly proud. She wore on her head a plain snug turban of cashmere, over which a shawl was thrown, enveloping her cheeks, throat and shoulders; and from the midst of its folds her little grey eyes peeped forth with lynx-like acuteness. The party consisted of about sixty persons, and the Begum, who considers herself now on an equality with the lords of creation, was the only lady at the table.27

  Farzana knew that her jagir would revert to the British after her death and she had the Governor General’s assurance, for what it was worth, that her pensioners would be looked after by the British government. What she had yet to safeguard was her fortune. It had been transferred from its underground strongroom in the old palace at Sardhana into a specially constructed treasury in the new palace, but in order to be absolutely certain that no one, British or otherwise, could get their hands on it, in 1835 she told David to place it, in his name, in the safe keeping of an English lawyer in Meerut. This he dutifully did, noting in his diary that by the end of May he had transferred a total of ‘35½ lakhs in ready coin’ (equivalent to nearly half a million pounds then and more than £19 million now). At the same time, and in honour of the man to whom she, and now he, owed everything, she asked him to change his name to David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre.

  Since no one, not even Farzana herself, knew exactly when she had been born, no one knew exactly how old she was; but by 1835 there was no question that she was antique. In the spring of that year Thomas Bacon observed that ‘she appears to exist principally on tea and the smoke of tobacco, and to keep death at arm’s length more by the energy of her mind than by any remaining strength of the flesh’. But by the end of the year even the energy of her mind was failing and she was all but bedridden, rising from her couch only to go to church.

  With Gokul Chand in constant attendance making notes for his eulogy, David sat with her for hours at a time, rubbing her back, massaging her aching limbs and tempting her appetite with morsels of her favourite melon. In her waking moments she reminisced about life with his great-grandfather Walter Reinhardt Sombre, about Shah Alam and Najaf Khan and about George Thomas and Pierre Antoine Levassoult. But mostly she slept, dosed with laudanum by Dr Drever to ease her pain. David was desolate. ‘I felt greatly for her suffering…she has grown very weak and I could not help sobbing more than once today.’ On 24 January 1836 Bishop Julius Caesar was summoned to her room to say mass, and three days later she died. As near as anyone can tell she was eighty-six years old.

  After lying in state overnight in the great hall of her new palace, Farzana was buried the following day ‘with all the pomp and ceremony befitting a great ruler’. Sepoys from the Sardhana Brigade lined the half-mile route as the cortège, ‘preceded by four elephants from which alms and cakes were distributed amongst the crowd’, made its way from the palace to the church. The procession was headed by her personal bodyguard in their full-dress uniform of yellow turban and long blue caftan, followed by a gun carriage bearing her body which was draped with a funeral pall held by David, his two brothers-in-law and Farzana’s physician Dr Drever, and which was shaded by an embroidered canopy supported by Antonio Reghelini and three other officers. Bishop Julius Caesar followed close behind, ‘chanting portions of the service aided by the choristers’, and was in turn followed by the chief magistrate of Meerut and the senior members of her household, ‘the whole brought up by a battalion of her late Highness’s infantry and a troop of horse’. According to a report in the Meerut Observer,

  The crowds, assembled outside the palace walls and on the roads, were immense, and a scene of lamentation and sorrow was apparent. The grief was deep and silent; the clustered groups talked of nothing but the heavy loss they had sustained and the intensity of their sorrow was visible in their countenances.28

  A guard of honour from the 30th Bengal Native Infantry stood to attention as the cortège entered the church; a full Requiem Mass was performed ‘in excellent style and with great feeling’ by Bishop Julius Caesar; and her body was then lowered into the vault that had been prepared to receive it.

  ‘Thus terminated the career,’ continued the Meerut Observer, ‘of one who for upwards of half a century had held a conspicuous place in the political proceedings of India.’

  ____________________________

  * According to John Lall, Dyce’s mother was ‘a native woman related to Colonel David Ochterlony … probably an offspring of one of his retinue of concubines’. See Lall, John, Delhi: Roli Books, 1997, p.131.

  * The name of the architect of the palace is not known.

  * Robert Skinner (senior) was clearly unstable, and even his brother James found him worryingly unpredictable. In 1821, when he was thirty-eight years old, ‘he suspected one of his wives of a slight from the path of propriety – very unjustly, it is said – but he called her and all his servants together, cut off the heads of every individual in his household and then shot himself.’ (Emily Eden, 1866). Although this tragedy took place in Aligarh, Robert Skinner’s surviving offspring would remain at Sardhana as part of Farzana’s extended family.

  * A plaque on the church states that it was ‘built in 1822’, but construction seems to have continued for nearly a decade. Captain Mundy states that ‘the Begum was still building her Catholic chapel’ when he visited Sardhana with Lord Combermere in 1828. The plaque was probably installed in 1822.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘The passing away of such a celebrity,’ wrote the Meerut Observer a week later, ‘marks not just the close of her life but the close of the last chapter in the history of Sardhana.’ The British authorities had wasted no time. After the burial service the chief magistrate of Meerut, Mr Hamilton, had gone straight from the church to the palace for the reading of a proclamation announcing the resumption of Farzana’s jagir by the British government. The speed of the move might have taken everyone by surprise, but the British were only fulfilling to the letter their agreement that the jagir should be Farzana’s ‘for as long as she may live’.

  That very same day the Sardhana Brigade was disbanded, their arms, equipment and ammunition were inventoried and removed to the Company’s armoury, and the estate was put under the management of English officers ‘whose orders alone were to be obeyed’.1 ‘In less than a month’, wrote a contemporary contributor to Notes & Queries, ‘Sardhana, which had been a populous place, became almost deserted and lapsed into the condition of an ordinary village.’2


  The individual bequests in Farzana’s will were met from a fund she had set up for the purpose. They included two lakh rupees (£25,000 then and over £1 million now) to be held in trust for David’s sisters, both of whom had married officers in the Sardhana Brigade, Rs 18,000 to George Thomas’s son John, Rs 9,000 to Antonio Reghelini and a small bequest to Julius Caesar.

  When William Sleeman visited Sardhana a month later he found the bishop sunk in gloom ‘because the Begum did not leave him so large a legacy as he expected’. Having tried, and failed, to get the now-called David Dyce Sombre to increase what he saw as a paltry reward for his years of loyal service, Father Julius Caesar left Sardhana and is reported to have spent some time cohabiting with a daughter of General Perron before being recalled to Rome, there to be stripped of his bishopric and eventually defrocked.3 The pensions that Farzana had been led to believe the British would continue to pay to her dependents were recalculated by Chief Magistrate Hamilton, who reduced them by half before ordering that they should be paid out of the sum she had left for the poor of Sardhana.

  David Dyce Sombre’s is a longer, and sadder, story. Sharing with his adoptive mother an admiration for all things British, and bamboozled by his drinking companions at Meerut into believing that he was accepted as their social equal rather than as a rich and gullible dupe, he set his heart on going to England. Before he left, he went to Agra to visit the graves of his great-grandfather Walter Reinhardt and his grandfather Louis Balthazar. From there he rode out to Hansi to visit his friend Joe Skinner, son of the incomparable James. ‘Was well received by the Colonel, who lives like a prince,’ wrote David in his diary. ‘The Skinners are very kind, especially Joe and the old man.’

  As the age of the freelances drew to a close, the Skinners were almost unique in still living the life of Indian princes. And where better than Hansi? Following Lord Lake’s victory over the Marathas at Delhi, the whole district of Haryana had passed to the British who, having no wish to govern it themselves, had cast about for someone totally trustworthy who would be capable of keeping its unruly population under control. It was James Skinner’s admiration for George Thomas, and his predilection for a challenge, that had encouraged him to apply for the jagir of Hansi, the Haryana headquarters that the fearless Irish adventurer had made his capital and whose fort that had been the scene of his final defeat in 1801.

  When Skinner’s application succeeded in 1818, Hansi became the Skinner home, though it is not known how many of James’s estimated fourteen wives lived there with him. To this day his several-times-great-grandson and namesake Jim Skinner, a dapper octogenarian in neatly pressed checked shirt and jeans, resides there intermittently, camping amongst the portraits of his ancestors in the former Officers’ Mess and making a defiant last stand, of which George Thomas would surely be proud, against the Haryana state government’s determination to redevelop the tree-choked acres of what remains of the Skinner estate.

  In spite of the Scottish-Indian parentage that had disqualified him for so long from such honours, Skinner’s achievements as commander of the famous ‘Skinner’s Horse’,* an irregular cavalry regiment he had raised on the orders of Lord Lake after the battle of Aligarh, had earned him the award of CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath) and, in 1828, the rank of lieutenant colonel in the British army. Few people were better equipped than he to warn David Dyce Sombre of the difficulties that someone of mixed race would face if he went to England, and he advised him strongly against going. But David would not be dissuaded. ‘Quite affected’ by his parting from the kindly Skinners, he returned to Meerut, arranged for the transfer of his fortune into the hands of a lawyer in Calcutta and said his farewells to Sardhana. Travelling slowly down the Ganges, he paused at Patna to visit the site of the infamous massacre and at Berhampore to visit the cemetery. ‘I went to the burying grounds on purpose to see Geo Thomas’s tomb who is buried here, but could not find it though I searched a long time.’4 He arrived in Calcutta in February 1837.

  From a pestilential port and fort, Calcutta had grown into the economic, social, cultural and political centre of British colonial power. Neoclassical façades and imperial colonnades announced ‘the Athens of the East’ as the city acquired the architectural accoutrements of an administrative capital – Supreme Court, cathedral, town hall, mint and Marquess Wellesley’s magnificent Government House. Pretentious and ruthless, the metropolis soon gave David Dyce Sombre a taste of the difficulties to which James Skinner had referred. His mostly Anglo-Indian friends in the city – Hercules Skinner, Charles Ochterlony, Alexander Fraser – could do nothing to protect him as he was fleeced by his English lawyers and pestered for money by impecunious British officers aware of his enormous wealth. ‘People have nothing to do with me but ask for loans.’ Even his mixed-race servant called him a ‘poor black bugger’ and told him that ‘if it was not for your money no European would speak to you’. Within weeks he was close to despair, writing in his diary, ‘Misery, misery, misery. Oh God Father of all mercies look down upon me now, I am quite miserable.’ 5

  His departure for England was delayed for almost a year by a case raised against him in the Calcutta Supreme Court. His father, the importunate George Alexander Dyce, was suing him for a fourteen-lakh share of Farzana’s estate. Sick of being pestered by the ‘mad old man’, David eventually agreed to pay him a lump sum of 10,000 rupees and a pension of 1,500 a month. His spirits had meanwhile been boosted by a letter from Farzana’s old admirer Lord Combermere who, thinking he was doing the young man a favour, gave him some high-society introductions in London. Having taken a quick trip to Singapore in August 1837, where he received news from Sardhana of the death of his great-grandmother Bara Bibi, in February 1838 he set sail for England.

  Most of the three-month voyage was spent reading in his cabin. ‘I never leave it from breakfast until dinner time,’ he explained. ‘They [his British fellow passengers] are all cold because I am an outcaste, alias an ½ caste.’ This treatment set the pattern for the rest of David’s life. ‘Received very cooly’ by the various grandees to whom Lord Combermere had given him introductions, he would fall an easy victim to the first accomplished flirt to cross his path. In January 1839 he visited Rome to commemorate the third anniversary of Farzana’s death, and arranged for a memorial Mass in her name to be celebrated in the Church of San Carlo al Corso. While there, he also commissioned Adamo Tadolini to sculpt the massive white marble memorial that he himself had designed and that now stands in Sardhana church. Among the life-size figures grouped below the Begum on her musnud are statues of ‘Mr [David] Dyce Sombre in a mournful attitude’6 and Bishop Julius Caesar.

  Fortunately, as it turned out, he paid for the memorial while he was in Rome, and for it to be shipped to Sardhana when completed. Returning to London, he renewed his acquaintance with the accomplished flirt, the Honourable Mary Anne Jervis, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of the impecunious Viscount St Vincent, and in 1840 he married her. But ‘far from contributing to his peace and felicity, this matrimonial connection became the cause of his unhappiness and ruin’.7 For instead of treating her like a princess (as she had been brought up to expect of a husband) he used her like a concubine, and instead of being docile and submissive (as he had been brought up to expect of a wife) she was flighty, self-willed and, he thought, probably unfaithful. In July 1843 Mary Anne managed to persuade a Commission on Lunacy that her absurdly possessive husband was ‘of unsound mind and quite unfit to be entrusted with the management of his own affairs’. As a result, his entire fortune was put into a trust of which she herself was the only beneficiary.

  Eluding his keepers, David fled to Paris where he spent six years living on a pittance and compiling a 600-page work entitled Mr Dyce Sombre’s Refutations of the charge of lunacy brought against him in the Court of Chancery. In 1850, his body ravaged by syphilis and ‘his heart heavy with sorrow and disappointment’, he slipped back across the Channel to London where, on 1 July 1851, ‘he died a terrible and lon
ely death at Fenton’s Hotel in St James’s Street.’8 He was forty-three years old.

  David’s fortune made Mary Anne née Jervis not just one of the richest women in England, but the rightful owner of all his property in India, including Farzana’s three palaces. She never visited them, but possibly prompted by a guilty conscience, she did use some of the money to maintain the fabric of the palaces and to build in the grounds of the old palace a hospital ‘for the benefit of the native and other necessitous population of Sardhana and the neighbourhood’. In 1847 she sold the Delhi palace to a bank, whose English manager and his family were killed on its roof during the Mutiny ten years later.

  According to a plaque on the front of the building, ‘the palace is also famous for housing Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal ruler, after he was captured for his alleged involvement in the mutiny of 1857’. Badly damaged in the fighting, it was later acquired and restored by Lloyds Bank, whose name still adorns the parapet, before being bought by Delhi businessman Seth Bhagirath Mal in 1940 and renamed Bhagirath Palace. The Sardhana palaces were put up for auction after Mary Anne’s death in 1893 and were purchased by the Catholic Mission of Agra, who turned the old palace into St John’s Seminary and the new palace into the St Charles Inter College.

  Dedicated as the Shrine of Our Lady of Graces by the bishop of Meerut in 1957, the Sardhana church was declared a basilica by Pope John XXIII in 1961. It is now the most important centre for Catholic pilgrimage in north India, though few of the devotees who file through the doors laden with devotional aids and plastic madonnas know anything at all of its founder.