Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/726

 the ruling chiefs and their courts admirably fitted him for the important and often delicate duties of the office, which included that of advising the secretary of state for India on political questions relating to the native states. Arrangements for the reception of Indian magnates at the English court were in his charge, and heavy work devolved upon him at King Edward VII's coronation in 1902, in which year he received the decorations of K.C.I.E. and M.V.O. He became C.V.O. in June 1907.

His official position brought him into close contact with Indian students, in whose welfare he was always deeply interested. He also took an active part in the work of associations and charities for the benefit of Indians. To these objects he devoted himself unsparingly.

It was while attending, with Lady Wyllie, an entertainment given to Indians by the National Indian Association at the Imperial Institute, London, on the night of 1 July 1909, that Wyllie was assassinated, almost under the eyes of his wife, by Madho Lal Dhingra, a Punjabi student, who suddenly fired at him with a revolver, killing him instantly. This insane outrage upon an innocent and true friend of Indians was the precursor of similar crimes committed in India. Dr. Cawas Lalcaca, a Parsi physician of Shanghai, who bravely interposed to save Wyllie, was also mortally wounded. Dhingra was convicted of the double crime at the Central Criminal Court on 23 July, and was hanged at Pentonville prison on 17 August.

Wyllie's tragic death was felt as deeply in India as at home. Flags were put at half-mast, and public offices were closed throughout Rajputana and central India on reception of the news; and on the day of Wyllie's funeral (in Richmond cemetery) a salute of thirteen guns was fired from the palace fortresses of Rajputana. Viscount Morley, the secretary of state in council, recorded ‘his high appreciation of Wyllie's admirable services,’ and his ‘profound sense of the personal loss’ sustained by himself and his colleagues ‘by the blind, atrocious crime.’ He also granted a special pension of 500l. to Lady Wyllie ‘in recognition of her husband's long and excellent service to the state, and in view of the circumstances in which he met his death.’ Memorial funds were raised both in England and in India. From the English fund a marble tablet erected in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral was unveiled by Earl Roberts on 19 Oct. 1910, in the presence, among others, of the three successive secretaries of state (Lord George Hamilton, Viscounts Midleton and Morley) whom Wyllie had served at the India office. An inscription beneath a portrait medallion was written by Lord Curzon of Kedleston. The balance, 2551l., the ‘Curzon Wyllie memorial fund,’ was entrusted to the Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Limehouse, on the governing body of which he had served. A brass tablet was also placed in the central hall of the home. At Marlborough College there was founded a Curzon Wyllie memorial medal to be given annually to the most efficient member of the officers' training corps. In India the Curzon Wyllie Central Memorial Fund committee have erected at a cost of 2000l. a marble aramgarh (place of rest) in Ajmer, Rajputana, to provide shade and rest and water for men and animals. A portrait by Mr. Herbert A. Olivier, exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1910, was presented to Lady Wyllie by the same committee; a replica has been placed in the Mayo college for chiefs at Ajmer. Local memorials have also been instituted in many of the states of Rajputana and central India.

 WYON, ALLAN (1843–1907), medallist and seal-engraver, born in 1843, was the son of Benjamin Wyon [q. v.], chief engraver of the royal seals, and the younger brother of Joseph Shepherd Wyon [q. v.] and Alfred Benjamin Wyon [q. v.] He was early taught the arts hereditary in his family, and for a time aided his brother Joseph in his medal-work. From 1884 till his death he carried on in London the business of the Wyon firm of medallists and engravers founded by his grandfather, Thomas Wyon the elder [q. v.] From 1884 to 1901 he held the post of engraver of the royal seals, a post that had been successively held by his father and his two elder brothers. He made the episcopal seals for the archbishops of Canterbury and York; the seal for the secretary of Scotland in 1889, and the great seal of Ireland in 1890. The great seal of Queen Victoria of 1899 was the work of George William De Saulles. Among Wyon's medals may be mentioned: Sir Joseph Whitworth (commemorating the Whitworth scholarships founded 1868); the Royal Jubilee medal of 1887; Charles Darwin (Royal