White Mughals (72 page)

A few weeks before he died in the summer of 1812, William sold all his possessions from his Exeter townhouse;
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and on 22 August he overdosed on laudanum ‘near London’, aged fifty-eight.
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It remains uncertain whether the death was a suicide or not.

Another tragedy followed close on William’s overdose.

A month later, while the family was still in mourning, the eleven-year-old Sahib Allum, or William George, as he was now known, fell into ‘a copper of boiling water’ and was disabled for life, with at least one of his limbs requiring amputation.
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A letter in shaky old man’s handwriting from the Handsome Colonel to Kitty (as Katherine was now known), written immediately after the accident, survives in the archive of their descendants. It shows the closeness of the relationship that had developed between the grieving grandfather and his ten-year-old Anglo-Indian granddaughter:

It is the last letter to survive from the Handsome Colonel. Having outlived all but one of his sons he died six years later, in 1818, at the grand old age of eighty-nine.
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After the funeral, Kitty and William George were shunted off yet again, this time to live in rotation with their various married cousins, William Kirkpatrick’s daughters: first Clementina, Lady Louis; then Julia, who had married Edward Strachey (Mountstuart Elphinstone’s friend and former travelling companion who had stayed with James at the Hyderabad Residency in 1801); and finally Isabella Buller, who had moved back to England from Calcutta with her husband Charles, become a fervent Evangelical, and set up house on Kew Green. William George begins to fade from the picture at this point: a dreamy, disabled poet, obsessed with Wordsworth and the metaphysics of Coleridge, but sufficiently active (and attractive) to marry at the age of twenty, and to father three girls.

As William George disappears into the background in the 1820s, Kitty begins to takes centre stage. She was already attracting attention as a woman of quite remarkable beauty—as well as one, thanks to her father’s generous legacy, of unusual means. In 1822, when Kitty was aged twenty, she met the new tutor Isabella Buller had hired to teach her two sons. He was a young, unknown and struggling Scottish writer and philosopher, three years her senior. His name was Thomas Carlyle. And it was through his pen that Kitty comes suddenly into dazzling focus.

Carlyle had arrived in London off the boat from Edinburgh in the spring of 1822. It was his first visit to the city, and, as he wrote years later in his
Reminiscences:

Carlyle heard a great deal about Kitty that first week in London. He was staying with his childhood friend, the fiery Evangelical preacher Edward Irving, at 7 Myddelton Terrace. As Irving was too poor to furnish his own house, two of his most ardent admirers had done so for him at a cost of £500, a princely sum in those days. The two ‘rich and open-handed ladies’ were Mrs Buller’s sister, Julia Strachey, and her cousin, Kitty Kirkpatrick.
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Both were religious—Julia Strachey especially so—and attracted to the Evangelical Clapham Sect, ‘whose pious members, it was said, would ask each other at intervals “Shall we Engage?” and drop to their knees’.
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Irving, with his gaunt features and black broad-brimmed hat, was one of the Sect’s star performers, and crowds numbering in the thousands would eagerly squeeze into the Caledonian Chapel to await one of his breathless three-hour sermons.

Over the months that followed Carlyle saw more and more of Kitty, and became increasingly fascinated with her lovely voice, her sense of humour, ‘a slight merry curl of the upper lip, the carriage of her head, the quaint little things she said, and her low-toned laugh’.
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Soon after their first meeting, Carlyle was invited over to Shooter’s Hill, the Stracheys’ country house. ‘I remember entering the little winding avenue,’ he later wrote, ‘and seeing, in a kind of open conservatory or verandah on our approaching the house, the effulgent vision of “dear kitty” buried among the roses and almost buried under them … the before and after and all the other incidents of that first visit are quite lost to me ... ’
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Although Carlyle was already involved in an intense (though at this stage largely epistolary) relationship with the formidably clever and acerbic Jane Welsh of Haddington, East Lothian, whom he would later marry, the young philosopher clearly fell a little in love with Kitty. Soon after he got to know her he wrote to Jane:

Jane, predictably enough, grew to become deeply jealous of this constant talk of Kitty in Carlyle’s letters. ‘I congratulate you on your present situation,’ she wrote, acid dripping from every stroke of her pen,

Jane’s jealousy became all the more acute when Kitty, Carlyle and the Stracheys set off on a trip to Paris in the autumn of 1824, during which, according to Carlyle’s later account, Julia Strachey seems to have tacitly pushed the two together.
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Jane’s response when she heard about this trip was characteristically forthright: ‘Paris? Art thou frantic? Art thou dreaming? Or has the Hindoo Princess actually bewitched thee that thou hast brought thy acid visage into this land of fops and pastry cooks, where Vanity and Sensuality have set up their chosen shrine?’
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Two years later, with Kitty still very much at the centre of Carlyle’s life and letters, Jane continued to shoot off jealous darts in her direction: ‘Your ‘’Rosy-fingered Morn”, the Hindoo Princess, where is she?’
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Or: ‘There is Catharina Aurora Kirkpatrick for instance, who has £50,000 and a princely lineage, and “never was out of humour in her life”; with such a “singularly pleasing creature” and so much fine gold you could hardly fail to find yourself admirably well off.’
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As Jane Welsh was all too aware, Kitty was indeed a woman of considerable means, and Carlyle was only a tutor. But ironically, despite the former’s Indian blood and the latter’s subsequent fame, marriage to Carlyle would have been regarded as inappropriate for Kitty, due to the perceived disparity in class and status between the two, though they were clearly and openly attracted to one another.
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As Kitty later explained to one of her friends (taking a swipe at Jane in the process), ‘He was then the tutor to my cousin, Charles Buller, and had made no name for himself; so of course I was told that any such idea could not be thought of for a moment. What could I do with everyone against it?
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Now anyone might be proud to be his wife, and he has married a woman quite beneath him.’
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In 1828, Isabella Buller’s eldest son Charles wrote to tell Carlyle the news of the latest tragedy in Kitty’s life: the death of her beloved brother William George at the age of only twenty-seven: ‘We have some expectation of seeing Miss Kirkpatrick soon, but she is in great trouble,’ wrote Buller. ‘Her brother William, perhaps you already knew, died in May after a painful and lingering illness. His poor young wife has gone mad and Kitty, after all this, has been in a very wearisome dispute with her sister respecting the care of her brother’s children.’
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A year later, possibly on the rebound, Kitty finally found the love, support and stability that had always eluded her, in the person of a nephew of Sir John Kennaway, the dashing Captain James Winslowe Phillipps of the 7th Hussars.
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They married on 21 November 1829.
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Carlyle, himself now clearly jealous, dismissed Phillipps (quite inaccurately) as ‘an idle ex-Captain of Sepoys’;
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but the marriage was a passionate one, and in Phillipps’ love letters to Kitty, still in the possession of their descendants, he assures her that ‘How sincerely & devotedly I
love
you, words cannot express’.
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Shortly after this, Carlyle began work on his celebrated though almost unreadable (and indeed now little-read) novel
Sartor Resartus
(’The Tailor Retailored’). This deeply enigmatic book—even by the standards of the other work produced by the Sage of Ecclefechan—aimed to take on the great issues of Faith and Justice through the curious guise of a History and Philosophy of Clothing by the German Professor of Things in General, the ‘Visionary Pedant’ Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. At the centre of the narrative of the book lies the story of Professor Teufelsdröckh’s relationship with the aristocratic Zähdarm family and his fascination for Blumine, who having made the Professor ‘immortal with a kiss’ then ‘resigned herself to wed some other’. Teufelsdröckh meets Blumine at an ‘Aesthetic Tea’ in the garden house of Frau Zähdarm, where she sits embowered in a cluster of roses. She is a brunette (‘dusky red’), young, hazel-eyed, beautiful and somebody’s cousin, ‘a many-tinted radiant aurora … this fairest of Orient Light bringers … his whole heart and soul were hers’.
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At the time of publication, and for about forty years after, while the book was still being eagerly read, there was a fierce debate as to the identity of Blumine, with Jane Welsh Carlyle, Margaret Gordon (Carlyle’s first love) and Kitty Kirkpatrick all canvassed as potential candidates.
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No one in the Strachey family, however, had any doubt. As Lady Strachey remarked to her son George on reading it, ‘The book is as plain as a pikestaff. Teufelsdröckh is Thomas [Carlyle] himself. The Zähdarmes are your uncle and aunt Buller. Toughgut is young Charles Buller. Philistine is Irving. The duenna cousin is myself. The rose garden is our garden with roses at Shooter’s Hill, and the Rose Goddess [Blumine] is Kitty.’
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According to George Strachey, ‘That “Blumine” personified Miss Kirkpatrick has always passed in the family for a certainty, requiring no more discussion than the belief that Nelson stood on the column in Trafalgar Square.’
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