180 H. HOSTEN ON 



There are other points which favour the antiquity of the Bourbon house of Bhopal. 

 Saveille Bourbon (b. 1582) l is said to have married one Miss or Mrs. Allemainein 1600. 

 Now in Padres Santos' Cemetery, Agra, there is an inscription recording that 10 A 

 MvEman/morreo 1619 1 (=John Alemandiedin 1619). 2 L11712 {sic), a Francis de Bour- 

 bon married a Miss da Silva, who may have been a daughter of Xavier da Silva, who 

 settled at Jaypur, at the Court of Jay Singh II., in the first quarter of the 18th century 

 and became the progenitor of a long line of physicians. 3 Finally, Salvador de Bourbon 

 (b. in 1736), who belonged to the sixth generation of Indian Bourbons, married a 

 Miss " Bervette." She was evidently a descendant of the Frenchman Bravette, whom 

 Manucci mentions (Storia do Mogor, I. 171) as having come to India in Jahangir's 

 reign. Fr. Botelho says he was one of the King's lapidaries.* He had a son born to 

 him at Agra, named Jacome Bravette, who is described as still a young man between 

 1648 and 1654. In December 1912 I found his epitaph in Padres Santos' Cemetery, 

 Agra. It runs thus : aqvi iaz iaco/me bravETTE/faleceo aos/i [perhaps : 7] DE 

 MARCO/1686./ (=Here lies James Bravette who died on the 1st (7th?) of March 

 1686). After 1736 several other marriages took place between the Bravettes and 

 the Bourbons. 



According to Father A. Strobl's letters, a mission station and a Church with a 

 resident priest were opened at Narwar in 1743, and, according to Col. Kincaid, Francis 

 de Bourbon came to Narwar with all his clan to the number of about 300 souls not long 

 after the plunder of Delhi in 1739. Three miles from there lies the now ruined Fort 

 of Shergarh, which was entrusted to him. Fr. Tieffen taller does not, however, speak 

 of any Christians at ' ' Shergarh , " but at the Narwar Fort. He was himself more 

 than 13 years the Chaplain of the family. 6 He wrote that, after the Raja's palace, one 

 of the finest buildings within the Narwar Fort, " was the palace of a certain Christian, 

 born of Armenian parents, whom the gentoo Rajah admitted to the government of this 

 province, and whom the Mogol Emperors loaded with honours and favours. He 

 had houses built for all his family, and a Chapel to God, where he and the other 

 worshippers of Jesus Christ, whether relatives or servants, assemble on all Feast- 

 days and Sundays, one of the Jesuit Fathers saying Mass." a 



Who else but the Bourbons could then have been living at Narwar, near Shergarh, 

 which their tradition speaks of as the hereditary fief received from Akbar ? And yet 

 the head of the Narwar family at that time is said by the Jesuits to be of Armenian 

 parentage, and Col. Kincaid states that Francis de Bourbon (born in 1680) had 

 married in 1710 an Armenian lady, cc a relative of his own,' ' and that he was himself 

 descended from Anthony Bourbon (b. 1646), who had married the " grand-daughter of 



1 Cf. Kincaid ; but 1560 supra, p. 178. 



2 Cf. E. A. H. Blunt, List of Inscriptions on Christian Tombs in the U.P. of Agra and Oudh, Allahabad, 1911, 



p. 41. — The word Aleman might mean also " German." 



3 Cf. ibid., pp. 48-53. * Cf. MS. in my possession. 



6 Cf. Bernouiuj, Description Hist, et Geogr. de I'Inde, vol. I (1786), pp. 4-5. Tieffentaller was at Narwar between 

 July 1747 and the beginning of 1750, also between December 1751 and 1765. A small Catholic Cemetery in the fort of 

 Narwar contains a chapel and several tombs, one of which is dated 1747. Cf. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Oxford, vol. 

 XVIIl(jQ08),p.397. 



6 Cf. Bernouii.1,1, op. cit., I, pp. 175.176. 



