Sultan Abu Bakar, Queen Victoria and the Golden Gift

Abu Bakar's gift to Queen Victoria, a model of the Albert Memorial

“A Royal Quest”, Chapter 5 of Palace of Ghosts, is about the lifelong quest of Temenggong Abu Bakar, later Sultan Abu Bakar, to realise his life’s goal: royalty. Like most tasks undertaken by Abu Bakar, failure was never going to be an outcome. To mark the achievement of his goal Sultan Abu Bakar built an enormous palace; Istana Tyersall was a magnificent statement announcing his presence on the world stage. But becoming a Sultan, a sovereign monarch, is not something you fill in an application form for. It requires recognition by people who already had the status you aspired to and, in the 1880s there was no one on earth whose status outshone that of Britain’s Queen Victoria.

Victoria and Abdul

Shrabani Basu’s brilliant 2010 book Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant tells the amazing story of an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim who, on becoming a servant to Queen Victoria in 1887, developed a remarkable relationship with the Queen in spite of the strong opposition from her family and household. The relationship lasted until the Queen’s death in 1901.  The book was followed by a film starring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria in 2017 which popularised the story and brought it a global audience, grossing nearly $70 million at the box office. There were, of course, some important events that led up to the start of the relationship. Basu highlights two: the death of Victoria’s beloved husband Prince Albert in 1861; and then the death of John Brown, her loyal servant and confidante of 20 years, in 1883. Victoria was left emotionally bereft and desperate for companionship. 

Less well known, but certainly of more lasting consequence, was the relationship that developed between Queen Victoria and another Asian gentlemen: none other than Abu Bakar of Johor. His relationship with the British royal family began 11 years before that of Victoria and Abdul Karim, initially with Edward, the Prince of Wales, but soon afterwards with his mother Queen Victoria. Their first meeting was in May 1866: Victoria was 47 years old and grieving, Abu Bakar was 34 years old, charming and exotically handsome. Over the course of the next 24 years, they met several times, including informally and privately. Abu Bakar was invited to stay at both Windsor Castle and Balmoral Castle and was considered by many to be the Queen’s favourite. But, of course, Abu Bakar had a state to run and although visited London often, he was, for the most part, absent from England. It’s fun to speculate how the relationship might have developed had Abu Bakar’s circumstances been similar to those of Abdul Karim who appeared on the scene 19 years later. His relationship with the Queen and the royal family was close, but Abu Bakar had a higher purpose. 

Basu’s book, and the subsequent film, speculate at length on Queen Victoria’s state of mind that may have contributed to the circumstances that led to the relationship with Abdul Karim. Whatever that may have been–perhaps vulnerability and a yearning for companionship–it would have been the same state of mind that occupied Victoria during the years that Abu Bakar was her frequent guest in Britain. There were many episodes that took place between the ascendancy of Abu Bakar to the throne on his father’s death in 1862 and his grand finale at Istana Tyersall in 1895. Palace of Ghosts explores the most important and consequential of them including this most intriguing of them: his relationship with the British royal family. In less than 50 years, Abu Bakar was somehow able to elevate his family from being considered by some as little better than piratical nuisances to being wined and dined by the Queen of the world’s most powerful empire at the latter's palaces and castles in Britain.

Victoria and Abu Bakar

Queen Victoria, her son the Prince of Wales, who became later King Edward VII, and the British Establishment were pivotal in enabling Abu Bakar's ascendency to royalty, an outcome that many others, British and Malay alike, thought was a travesty. On being asked if she would make Abu Bakar a sultan, Queen Victoria said words to the effect of she wasn’t sure whether the title was hers to bestow upon him, but that she would be happy to recognise him as such. And so, in 1886, that is what he became thereafter: the Sultan of a small, newly constituted territory recognised by no other nation on earth, but nevertheless recognised by the monarch of the most powerful global empire that existed at the time. It was, to put it mildly, and from Abu Bakar’s perspective, a major result.

But how did Abu Bakar win such an approval from Queen Victoria?

Queen Victoria was married to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840 until the latter's death, possibly from typhoid, in 1861. Their relationship was considered by most of the British populace as a model of love and devotion. They had nine children together, and for many Victorian households, they represented the epitome of how family life should be lived. Prince Albert's untimely death was a shocking event. It deeply affected Queen Victoria, plunging her into a long period of grief. She withdrew from public life and wore black apparel for the remainder of her long life. Despite stress fractures in their marriage, with Albert apparently feeling isolated in his adopted country and a sense of loneliness and exasperation with Victoria’s failure to understand him, there is no doubt that Victoria admired him unstintingly and praised him continually. She idolised him to the extent of dependency, emotions that she understood to be a deep love and affection for him. Despite today’s undercurrents of analysis about the real state of their relationship, neither party ever publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the other.

The Albert Memorial in London's Hyde Park

Preceded by the death of her mother, her husband Albert’s death was followed by other people close to her: Albert’s close friend Baron Stockmar’s in 1863; Lord Palmerston’s in 1865; her uncle Leopold’s also in 1865, and others. Mourning became a habit of Victoria’s, and she has even been described as “wallowing in grief” from time to time.

Between 1866, five years after Albert’s death, and 1890, there were several important encounters between Abu Bakar and the British royal family, some of them deeply personal. The story of such encounters is told in Chapter 5 of Palace of Ghosts, “A Royal Quest”. Abu Bakar was able to gain access to the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria’s eldest son and heir, because of his close relationship with certain British colonial governors. This was not an accident. Some colonial governors were much better connected than others and Abu Bakar made it his business to find out which of them were connected to whom. He managed to secure an appointment with the Prince of Wales in 1866 and, after a successful luncheon, had his first audience with Queen Victoria two days later. This was only five years after Albert’s death, with Queen Victoria still in a deep state of mourning. Whether Queen Victoria felt charmed, comforted, fascinated, or intrigued by Abu Bakar, the net result was that she was temporarily distracted from her grieving state. Somehow, they clicked, and somehow Abu Bakar read the situation with an astonishing sense of perception.

Nine years later, the memory of that encounter led to a rendezvous between Abu Bakar and the Prince of Wales in India during the latter’s famous tour of the Empire’s dominions in the subcontinent beginning in 1875. Their meeting, their time spent together, and their conversations would have certainly been reported back to Queen Victoria. A subsequent evening of dining between the British royals and Abu Bakar in London in 1878, led to a comment in the press that Abu Bakar had become a favourite of the Queen. Such a close relationship then led to Abu Bakar hosting the Queen’s two grandchildren, including a future King of England, in Johor and Singapore in 1882. 

Three years later, in the midst of intense negotiations in 1885 between Abu Bakar and the Colonial Office in London, Queen Victoria agreed to recognise him as Sultan of Johor. Job done. It was an intense effort by a highly motivated, sophisticated and charming Abu Bakar and a mourning, vulnerable, and perhaps forlorn Queen Victoria. Whether purposefully comforting or more calculating, or somewhere in between, the title of Sultan was the result Abu Bakar had been seeking all his life.

The Golden Gift

Abu Bakar’s relationship with Queen Victoria was not to end there. He, and the whole world, knew of Queen Victoria’s extended period of grief and mourning since Albert’s death in 1861. In 1887, two years after Queen Victoria recognised him as Sultan Abu Bakar, (the same year the Queen met Abdul Karim), he presented her with a very special gift. It was a half-metre tall model of the Albert Memorial, weighing nearly 6 kg of mostly 18 carat gold with additional silver and enamel modelling. The model records the appearance within the real memorial monument of the installation of a statue of Prince Albert in 1876. The model was presented to Queen Victoria by Abu Bakar as a Golden Jubilee gift. The actual Albert Memorial, of course, stands in London’s Hyde Park, across the road from the Royal Albert Hall. 

Queen Victoria must have been deeply touched by Sultan Abu Bakar's gift; he would have been acutely aware of the emotional turmoil Queen Victoria went through for many years after Albert's death. It was the perfect way to express his sympathy for the Queen and respect for the memory of Albert, as well as for him to express his deep gratitude for her recognition of his status as Sultan. Queen Victoria displayed the model at Osborne House, the royal residence built for Victoria and Albert and designed by Albert himself and which Victoria treated as a shrine to the Prince Consort after his death. The golden gift is now part of the Royal Collection Trust and was last put on public display in 2010 at the “Victoria and Albert: Art and Love” exhibition in Buckingham Palace, London. It was a poignant reminder of Victoria’s undying love for her husband. Yet it is also a reminder of the new beginning for Abu Bakar, his lifelong quest for acceptance, the royal dynasty that he founded and the legitimacy that Victoria’s recognition gave it. Hopefully, we’ll see it again sometime in the future!

Their last meeting was in 1890, when Abu Bakar was given the extraordinary privilege of an overnight stay in Windsor Castle. The Queen and the Sultan spent a couple of hours after dinner in private conversation. These six encounters with various British royals had significant consequences. Friendship with the royal family, specifically Queen Victoria and Prince Edward of Wales provided a unique context of support for Sultan Abu Bakar which few other foreign potentates ruling within the British Empire could claim to have. The royal family under Queen Victoria remained a force to be reckoned with in British politics and the many prime ministers who served under her, some of whom are the most famous names in British politics even today, held her in extremely high esteem. Neither the Queen nor the Prince of Wales would have overtly intervened in any kind of dispute the Colonial Office or others might have had with the Sultan. However, most senior figures who interacted with him were very well aware of his relationship with the royal family and would have been wary of doing or saying something that might result in them falling out of favour with the royals. The relationship also opened the doors to other aristocratic families in Britain and other royal courts in Europe and beyond. Finally, there was the prestige. Sultan Abu Bakar had not only been accepted into the highest echelons of royalty, but he was personal friends with them too. In both Singapore and Johor this bestowed upon him a huge amount of credibility, and for his followers was a source of enormous pride.