For my aunt, I think the book has sometimes been difficult. Just when she would think a particular section was finished I’d write or ring her with another letter, another diary revelation which I would insist had to be included. At other times with me in Thailand and her in England discussing the book has been problematic. Nevertheless, despite it all we’ve managed to stay good friends and produce a book which I hope does justice to my grandparents, who were both remarkable people in their own very different ways.
Narisa Chakrabongse
August 1994
I
The Siamese Royal Family
Katya, Prince Chakrabongse and their son Prince Chula.
The story of Katya – Ekaterina Ivanovna Desnitsky’s marriage to Prince Chakrabongse of Siam has intrigued me since I first heard of it in 1938, the year that their son and only child Prince Chula married my sister Lisba. Although there was considerable opposition to their marriage from my family, it was as nothing to the undisguised anger of the Siamese Royal Family when, in 1906, Chakrabongse, a son of the reigning monarch, chose a ‘farang’ – a foreigner – as his bride.
The Chakri Dynasty, rulers of Siam since 1782, had held to a strict tradition of consanguineous marriage among royalty ‘to maintain the purity of the stock’, and was shaken to the core, not so much by the fact that Katya was a commoner and an orphan without fortune, but because she was foreign. In the words of one of Chakrabongse’s full brothers, Prince Prajadhipok, ‘The marriage was a national dynastic catastrophe!’
To comprehend fully the intensity of this reaction on the part of his family, it is imperative to touch briefly on the background into which Chakrabongse was born in 1883.
Although his father, King Chulalongkorn, was said to have had ninety-two wives and seventy-seven children, his favourite wife was Queen Saowabha and Chakrabongse, one of her nine children, was one of his favourite sons. He was also the grandson of the great King Mongkut and the character and remarkable changes brought about in Siam by both his father and grandfather were profoundly to affect his own short life.
Mongkut, well known in the West through Anna Leonowens’ book An English Governess at the Siamese Court and the loosely derived musical, The King and I, was in every respect a different character from his portrayal in both. He was born in 1804, the son of King Rama II, and when he was twenty – as was customary for all male Siamese princes – he entered the priesthood for what was generally a short period of about three months. But in his case this ‘short period’ was prolonged into a sojourn of twenty-seven years, for hardly had he stepped inside the monastery doors, when the King, his Father, died without having named an heir.
Mongkut being conveniently out of the way, his half-brother Prince Chesdah – some say aided by a scheming mother – was nominated by the Accession Council as King. This may well have influenced Mongkut to remain in the priesthood, for although Chesdah was his senior, Mongkut might have thought he had a prior right to the throne, as Chesdah was the son of a minor wife, whereas Mongkut’s mother was royal. Whatever the reasons, the young Prince’s motives for abandoning the world in the prime of youth for half a lifetime’s submission to the disciplines of monastic life, was a decision eventually highly advantageous both for his own development and that of his country.
To begin with, his fellow monks were drawn from all ranks of society and as he travelled with them on foot all over his realm, he had the opportunity, unique for a royal prince of his day, of mingling democratically with people he would never have met otherwise, thus gaining first-hand knowledge of their lives and conditions.
Then, by learning Pali, the language in which Buddhist teaching is recorded, he acquired a rather more profound understanding of its tenets than he would have done had he left the monastery after only a few months. As it was, he was the only member of the Royal Family to have been awarded a first degree Doctorate in Theology.
He also learnt some Latin from the French Bishop Pallegoix with whom, as well as with English and American missionaries, he sometimes engaged in religious disputation, relaxed and friendly exchanges on his part, as he had the true Buddhist’s tolerance of other faiths. But despite the lack of any encouragement on his side, the zealous missionaries still laboured to convert him, undeterred by his known pronouncement on Christianity – ‘What you teach people to do is admirable, but what you teach them to believe is foolish!’
In 1844, when he was forty, he began to study English with some American missionaries, and made such progress that he came to regard it as his second language, speaking and writing it fluently with ‘rather a literary tinge’, as one of his teachers put it. Later he was to insist that his children spoke English too, and sent several of his sons to England for this purpose.
Even more important was the fact that his grasp of the language enabled him to read up-to-date scientific books on many subjects – astronomy was a special favourite – and these introduced him to a whole new world of modern thought. Thus, when the King, his brother, died in 1851 and at long last he was called to the throne at the age of forty-six, he was well prepared for kingship.
The discipline of his years in the priesthood, his great intellectual powers, and his contacts with ordinary people, had made him a man of remarkable balance and perception. He realised that his country, steeped in tradition, deeply religious, superstitious and with a respect for rank amounting to reverence, could only very gradually be guided into step with the modern world.
Soon after his own coronation, Mongkut appointed his full brother, Prince Chutamanni (known as King Pinklao), as Uparaja or second King, who was crowned in a ceremony only slightly less splendid than his own. He also had the good fortune to be blessed with an excellent Kalahom or Prime Minster, Sri Suriyawongse, so that his reign began under good auspices.
His power was absolute and government was by edict, each introduced by a recitation of the royal styles and titles, and commencing: ‘By royal command reverberating like the roar of a lion …’ There was also a palace gong that, if struck by a petitioner any afternoon or evening, ensured that the King would appear in person ‘when not otherwise occupied in affairs of the realm, and provided that it will not be raining at the time’.
King Chulalongkorn and Queen Saowabha.
King Mongkut in his coronation regalia.
Worthy of particular mention is his edict on faith, not only for its fine wording, but because it reflects the wholehearted aversion to bigotry and religious persecution that have always been an admirable feature of Buddhism: ‘No just ruler restricts the freedom of his people in the choice of their religious belief by which each man hopes to find strength and salvation in his last hour, as well as in the future beyond. There are many precepts common to all religions.’
It is said that, during his reign, no less than five thousand acts of law were passed ranging from grave affairs of state to an edict entitled ‘Advice against the inelegant practice of throwing dead animals in the waterways’. However, although alert to the benefit of contact with progressive Western ideas, Mongkut did not discard beliefs and traditions dear not only to his countrymen, but to himself. He was highly gratified, for instance, to be presented with four white elephants during his reign and in fact found time to write a book on these rare creatures. He lists as desirable ‘white hair and nails, and pink skin’ and also praised an animal with a beautiful snore, but added reflectively that ‘just as men have individual taste in women, this applies equally to elephants’.