A SCOTTISH museum will highlight its Jacobite collection’s unusual link with the last Sikh Maharajah of the Punjab at a conference on Friday.
Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (IMAG) and the Highland Folk Museum are jointly hosting the Anniversary Collections Conference at Inverness Town House.
The event celebrates 201 years since the founding of the Inverness museum and 90 years since Dr Isabel F Grant established the Highland Folk Museum and will focus on all that makes their collections unique.
(IMAG) is the oldest museum in Highland region and one of the oldest the UK. Its collections have changed over the last two centuries but there has been a constant – and growing – interest in items relating to Jacobite history.
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Culloden Battlefield, the site of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat in 1746, is just over five miles from the museum, and visitors want to know more, especially since the popularity of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books and the TV series.
However, people may not know that the core of IMAG’s Jacobite collection comes from Prince Frederick Duleep Singh, the son of the last Sikh Maharajah of the Punjab, a man whose own tragic family circumstances led him to empathise with the Stuart cause.
Frederick was the son of Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last Sikh ruler of the Punjab. In the 1840s, wars with the British in northern India had ended when the Maharajah, aged only 11, had surrendered his lands and possessions – including the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond – to the British.
The Maharajah was passed into the custody of the British, who oversaw his conversion to Christianity and brought him to Britain, where he became a favourite of Queen Victoria.
The Maharajah married a young Christian woman, Bamba, from a mission school in Cairo, and Prince Frederick was the third of their six living children.
Although later in life the Maharajah reconverted to the Sikh religion and began to resent the way he had been treated by the British, Frederick was brought up as the complete English gentleman.
Growing up in Suffolk and educated at Eton, he showed an early interest in the ancient buildings and stories of the landscape around him and he went on to study history at Cambridge. After a short stint in the Suffolk Yeomanry, he spent his life following his passion for history and collecting.
It is perhaps not hard to see why the children of the deposed Maharajah should find the dethroned Stuart monarchs fascinating.
Frederick’s sister, Princess Sophia, now celebrated as a noted Suffragette, described herself as a “staunch Jacobite”.
Frederick focused his collection on Jacobite relics. At one auction, he obtained a nightshirt and cap belonging to Charles I, and subsequently received a polite letter from the V&A, who wished that they had been able to buy the items.
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Frederick kept the clothes, adding to them a pendant containing a piece of the block on which Charles I had been executed, and a locket with a ringlet of Charles’s hair, as well as a suit of clothes once worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie.
He hung the great parlour at his house with Stuart portraits, labelling George I and II as the Old and Young Pretenders and giving King James III and King Charles III (Bonnie Prince Charlie) full royal titles – while hanging an oil painting of Oliver Cromwell disrespectfully upside down in the drawing room.
Frederick died in 1926, surrounded by his family. After his death, his sisters were left with the huge task of sorting out his collections, and in 1935, Princess Sophia wrote to Inverness Museum, at the suggestion of a friend of hers, Kathleen Mackenzie. Sophia offered Inverness Museum the loan, for an indefinite period, of Prince Frederick’s Jacobite collections.
Kathleen Mackenzie lived at Tomatin, near Inverness. She had got to know Sophia in the social round of the aristocracy – each year, Sophia and her siblings followed the wealthy on their annual trips to Scotland.
Frederick, like his father and brother, had been a great shot, and they would traipse around the grouse moors of Scotland, staying at local stately homes as they went out hunting, shooting and fishing.
Sophia was a regular attendee at the great Northern Meeting Ball, held annually in Inverness. She told Inverness Museum that “knowing and loving the country near Culloden I am particularly anxious that this collection should go to Inverness”.
Mackenzie helped Sophia to arrange for the transportation of the collection by goods train, and Inverness Museum received it in the autumn of 1935.
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By combining the donation with their established collections, the museum was able to fully reorganise to focus primarily on relics with Highland and Jacobite interest and, after a time, it was able to negotiate the loan becoming a permanent part of their collection.
The many valuable items from the Duleep Singh collection remain on display in Inverness Museum and Art Gallery – including the portrait of Cromwell, which still surveys Inverness visitors upside down today.
The Anniversary Collections Conference runs from 10am-4.30pm on Friday at Inverness Town House.
Writer Jennifer Morag Henderson, author of the biography of Josephine Tey, among other works, will speak about the Duleep Singh and Bowerbank Jacobite collections at 10.45am.
Other speakers are Dr Rhona Ramsay, Lyndsay McGill and Nysa N Louden.
Jennifer Morag Henderson’s original research on the Bowerbank and Duleep Singh Jacobite collections will be published in the next issue of academic journal the Review of Scottish Culture.
Tickets to view the conference talks online will be available until early December.
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