CHAPTER XXIII.
DHULEEP SINGH—AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER.
We must pass back to the fifties to introduce a personage who figures conspicuously in the sixties and seventies, both in comedy and tragedy, and then shuffled off this mortal coil and has long since been forgotten.
It was in ’56 when England had annexed Oude, that the ex-Queen and a considerable retinue arrived in London to “protest”—a process that must have enlightened, if it did not benefit, them in the ways of Imperial Policy.
Half-a-dozen houses in Marylebone Road were secured as a temporary palace, and it was thither, as a lad, that I accompanied my father, who had once held high office in the Punjaub.
The exact spot was where the Baker Street station now stands, and as one is nothing unless one is accurate, conceive entering the present dismal premises and finding in the “reception room” two or three beds, in one of which was the Queen; about the floor various courtiers were littered, whilst the atmosphere was so sour that one felt thankful the old woman’s reign had been cut short, and that henceforth sanitary arrangements, a tub, and other adjuncts of Christianity would prevail in Oude after the family had realised that “No mistakes were rectified after leaving the counter,” and that “Don’t you wish you may get it?” embodied our beneficent policy in the abstract.
Baker Street at the time swarmed with Mohammedans, for, by a coincidence, Lord Panmure, the Earl of Dalhousie, and Sir John Lawrence—all more or less associated with India—had houses in that then fashionable neighbourhood, and so enabled the “protesters” to combine business with pleasure at comparatively slight physical inconvenience.
Dhuleep Singh, another reputed Punjaubee, had also at this time been brought to England, and, although then pursuing the ordinary course of a schoolboy under General Oliphant, it was only later, as a Norfolk landlord, a masher, a burlesque conspirator, and the owner of the finest emeralds in the world, that he came into prominence.
It is in these latter roles that we purpose to interest our readers.
During the minority of this most fortunate Asiatic the savings out of his annuity of £40,000 a year had amounted to a colossal sum, and so Dhuleep Singh first comes into prominence, on attaining his majority, as a Norfolk squire and the owner of Elvedon Hall.
An excellent shot, it was some few years later that he made the sportsmanlike wager with Lord Sefton to slaughter a thousand head of game within a day. Rabbits were included in the bet, and impossible as such a feat may appear, the tameness of the pheasants in the over-stocked home preserves made it quite feasible. For some reason, however, it never came off.