The Tears of the Rajas by Ferdinand Mount

Author:Ferdinand Mount [Mount, Ferdinand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

It was one of the bonds between Thackeray and Marianne that they both had such acute memories of Southampton Row: the bustle of Uncle Ritchie’s Baltimore merchant’s business on the ground floor, the L-shaped drawing room where they staged plays and William acted Dr Pangloss in a huge wig, the fig tree in the long London garden. 3

Now, 25 years later, Marianne recreated that loving, tumbling, knockabout home for a new generation of ‘Indian children’. Soon they were joined by her husband, the genial Major Archibald Irvine of the Bengal Engineers, widely regarded as the finest sapper of his day. Twenty years earlier, he had blown open the gates of Bhurtpore (now Bharatpur), supposedly the most impregnable fortress in India, by a new technique devised at Chatham of digging long ventilated mineshafts under the target. The 10,000 tons of gunpowder in Irvine’s three tunnels exploded according to plan and caused appalling havoc. All told, 6,000 natives died in the ending of the siege. Irvine had been just about to leave for England with his family, when the first war against the Sikhs broke out. Irvine sent Marianne and the children on ahead, volunteered for service and performed brilliantly at the decisive Battle of Sobraon in February 1846 which ended the war and, among other things, tossed the Koh-i-Noor diamond into Queen Victoria’s lap. Arriving back in England with the Governor-General’s praises ringing in his ears, he was immediately appointed Director of Works at the Admiralty by the First Lord, none other than our old friend the Earl of Auckland (ministerial talent in the House of Lords was not so plentiful as to disqualify the author of one of the worst disasters in British military history).

Irvine’s sweet and noble nature made him yet another candidate for the original Colonel Newcome. ‘The Major’ was a hero to George Shakespear, too. Augusta recorded in her red leather notebook that ‘G. told me this evening in speaking of I. that M. ought to “salaam” to God twenty times a day for having such a husband.’

Alas, the Major was not destined to enjoy the retirement he deserved, for on a tour of inspection of the Admiralty docks at Portsmouth he had a bad fall, and he died before 1849 was out, leaving Marianne a widow at the age of 33 (there was the usual age gap between them – he was 53 when he died) with eight children ranging from 12 years to three months, the last being the placid, waxen-faced infant that WMT had seen on his surprise visit to Highgate. What all the rebellious sepoys in Rajasthan and Sikhs in the Punjab could not manage was brought about by a slippery cobblestone on a Portsmouth quay.

It is a testament to Thackeray’s gift for friendship with the young that it seemed natural for Charlotte, then aged 16, to write to tell him the sad news. And it is typical of him that he should have broken off from writing Pendennis and instantly written back

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