He was subsequently deposed by the British Crown, and thereafter exiled to Britain at age 15 where he was befriended by Queen Victoria, who is reported to have written of the Punjabi Maharaja: "Those eyes and those teeth are too beautiful".

After the end of the Second Anglo-Sikh War and the subsequent annexation of the Punjab on 29 March 1849,[11] he was deposed at the age of ten[12] and was put into the care of Dr John Login and sent from Lahore to Fatehgarh on 21 December 1849, with tight restrictions on who he was allowed to meet.

His health was reportedly poor and he was often sent to the hill station of Landour near Mussoorie in the Lower Himalaya for convalescence, at the time about 4 days' journey.

He was also invited by the Queen to stay with the Royal Family at Osborne, where she sketched him playing with her children and Prince Albert photographed him, while the court artist, Winterhalter, made his portrait.

[20] While Sir Samuel White Baker was visiting the Duke of Atholl on his shooting estate in Scotland, he befriended Maharaja Duleep Singh.

When he was 18, Singh wrote to his mother in Kathmandu, suggesting that she should join him in Great Britain, but his letter was intercepted by the British authorities in India and did not reach her.

Under cover of a letter from Login he wrote to the British Resident in Kathmandu, who reported that the Maharani had 'much changed, was blind and had lost much of the energy which formerly characterised her.'

The British government decided she was no longer a threat and she was allowed to join her son on 16 January 1861 at Spence's Hotel in Calcutta and return with him to England.

He was known for a lavish lifestyle, shooting parties, and a love of dressing in Highland costume and soon had the nickname "the Black Prince of Perthshire".

[22] (At the same time, he was known to have gradually developed a sense of regret for his circumstances in exile, including some inner turmoil about his conversion to Christianity and his forced departure from the Panjab).

[23] Maharaja Duleep Singh (as he became in June 1861) bought (or the India Office purchased for him) a 17,000 acres (69 km2) country estate at Elveden on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, close to Thetford, in 1863.

[27] Maharaja Duleep Singh was accused of running up large expenses and the estate was sold after his death to pay his debts.

Today, Elveden is owned by The 4th Earl of Iveagh, the head of the Anglo-Irish Guinness family of brewing fame; it remains an operating farm and private hunting estate.

In 1864, Duleep Singh married Bamba Müller in Cairo and established his family home at Elveden Hall in Suffolk.

Maharaja Duleep Singh's wish for his body to be returned to India was not honoured, in fear of unrest, given the symbolic value the funeral of the son of the Lion of the Punjab might have caused and the growing resentment of British rule.

His body was brought back to be buried according to Christian rites, under the supervision of the India Office, in Elveden Church beside the grave of his wife Maharani Bamba, and his son Prince Edward Albert Duleep Singh.

A life-size bronze statue of the Maharaja, showing him on a horse, was unveiled by the then Prince of Wales in 1999 at Butten Island in Thetford, a town which benefited from his and his sons' generosity.

[4] Maharani Bamba Müller was an Arabic-speaking, part-Ethiopian, part-German woman, whose father was a German banker and whose mother was an Abyssinian Coptic Christian slave.

She and Sir Duleep met in Cairo in 1863 on his return from scattering his mother's ashes in India; they were married in Alexandria, Egypt, on 7 June 1864.

She stayed with him through his years in Paris and also travelled with him to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he failed to persuade the Czar of the benefits of invading India through the north and reinstalling him as ruler.

[40] In 1854, Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, met her Master Morya in England, who was in her words, "in the company of a dethroned native prince".