Empress
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What followed was a piece of impromptu theatre in which the Indian princes took the lead. The throne remained, but the chairs seating the princes and other members of the order fanned out in an arc from the other side of the throne. The prince was brought into the tent by the British officials, followed by the Begum of Bhopal and Lady Mayo, and then a procession of ‘banners, esquires and pages’. As the prince knelt before the grand master, the Maharaja of Gwalior formally invested him, and the Maharaja of Jaipur pinned the Star onto his robe. Outside the tent sixty-five elephants, several with canopied howdahs, awaited the prince’s inspection, including his own on which had been placed Dalhousie’s silver howdah.12 This extemporised ceremonial contained very little that could be considered as a display of deference by the Indian princes. They met with Prince Alfred as senior members of the Order into which they admitted him. The act of an Indian maharaja pinning the Star of India onto an English prince is a significant reversal of the usual colonial roles. Only the silver howdah denoted how the British were first amongst equals; only the seating plans in the nave indicated an order of hierarchy – and it was one amongst the Indian princes and not one that separated Indians and Europeans.
As Prince Alfred left Calcutta, other parts of the Government of India’s protocol slipped away. The ban on extravagant presents was circumvented. The pundits at the Seven Tanks had given a silver hookah and a gold attar server. The Maharaja of Rewa had topped that with a diamond valued at £2,500 (hardly the ‘very small offering’ Mayo described to Argyll).13 The prince now headed off to hunt on the estates of the Maharaja of Benares, with a visit to the holy city of Benares to follow – to give him, as Mayo told the queen, a better idea of a ‘native city’ than anywhere else in India. Accolades started to flow. Passing through Burdwan en route to camp at Murshidabad, he was guest at a breakfast provided by the local maharaja, a visit which was later celebrated in a Sanskrit address provided by the Bengali poet Taranatha Tarkavcaspati. Then, in Benares, the poet Bharatendu Harischandra tried to present an offering of flowers to the prince. Prevented by William Muir, the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces from doing so in person, Harischandra invited fellow poets to his house and he read to them a biography of the prince. This gathering then published verses ‘expressing their heartfelt joy on the advent of the Royal Prince to this city’.14 The prince did not notice this ‘native’ welcome. He was similarly unimpressed by the Ganges at work, where an eclipse of the moon led 50,000 pilgrims to flock into the water, confiding to his mother that he did not know how many drowned, but suggested that those who did ‘will be consoled by going to heaven quicker than their neighbours’.15 Travel was not broadening his mind.
Mutiny memories then hoved into view, as the prince moved towards Delhi. At Agra there was a gun salute as the prince entered the town and the Taj Mahal was turned over for a fete attended by the Nawab of Rampur, his family and almost fifty local chiefs. A visit to the Church Missionary Society orphanage at Sikandra, where a choir sang the national anthem in Hindustani, was followed by a viewing of Akbar’s tomb. Alfred also attended a ball given by the local regiment and another by Lady Muir, the lieutenant-governor’s wife.16 Four days were spent in Delhi, encamped in the grounds of Ludlow Castle. Loyal addresses presented to the prince alluded to a complete break with the Mughal past. They spoke of ‘living among the monuments of a mighty empire passed away’. Then the prince rode the Delhi ridge along the route taken by the mutinous regiments in 1857, looking back to the conquered city.17
From Delhi Prince Alfred travelled into the Punjab. The chiefs turned out en masse at Lahore, a reminder of the loyalty that had helped save the Raj in 1857–8. The most powerful of them (Kashmir, Patiala, Bahawalpur, Jind, Nabha, Kapurthala and Malerkotla) greeted the prince on his arrival, and a fuller contingent awaited him in an elephant procession through the Akbari gate of the walled city the following day. A state banquet and a ball in the recently opened Palladian-style Montgomery Hall were laid on, as was a visit to the city museum and its exhibits of antiquities, guided by its curator Baden Henry Baden-Powell.18 Time was set aside for an exchange of presents with chiefs, and here the rules on gifts were stretched to the limit. The Maharaja of Kashmir came with two shawls worth £1,250, which had taken three years and over 300 men to weave and decorate. In public the prince was told he could not accept these, although he might present them instead as a gift to the queen. The northern portion of his tour drawing to a close, Alfred retraced his steps back to Amritsar, viewed the temple and tank, and then made the long journey to Awadh, glimpsing the Himalayas on the way. At Lucknow and Kanpur he paid respects at the memorials from 1857–8, sending his mother flowers picked from the Residency at Lucknow, and from the infamous well at Kanpur. He also met up in the Kaiserbagh Palace in Lucknow with those Taluqdars of Awadh who had remained loyal in 1857–8. Addressing him as the son of ‘our Mighty Sovereign and Empress’, they presented Alfred with an ornamental sword and shield. Another interlude of hunting, this time in the Terai, offered two weeks of respite before the prince proceeded south.19
As they bade farewell to Prince Alfred at Jabalpur, where he attended the ceremony marking the completion of the junction linking the northern and western parts of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, Mayo and his colleagues reckoned the trip had been a success.20 By arrangement the prince had made no speeches, except at Lucknow and Jabalpur, and he had disappointed some commentators by dressing plainly and seldom appearing in uniform. He had, however, obediently made his way through the different versions of India that the government had put on display. The legacy of the Indian revolt was everywhere. Then, having spent two and half months in the northern half of India, the prince sped through the rest of his tour in four weeks. Visits to Bombay and Madras were not planned when the trip was first plotted in 1868. Bombay was added as the prince approached the Indian subcontinent towards the end of 1869, hard to avoid once it was clear that the railway connections would be completed. It then made sense to include Madras as well, as the Galatea could sail south from Calcutta and collect its captain. There were even plans, which did not come to fruition, to take the prince overland to Madras via Hyderabad, but, not for the first time, the nizam’s kingdom eluded British ceremonial.21
Bombay welcomed Alfred off the train with a deputation comprising the governor, William Vesey-FitzGerald, and Indian princes drawn from the length and breadth of the presidency: notably, the Gaekwar of Baroda, the Raja of Kolhapur, the Rao of Cutch and the Nawab of Junagarh. Costs began to spiral out of control. The municipal illuminations budget was overspent, the presents exchanged between the prince and the Indian chiefs quickly ‘ran up the score’ and the Gaekwar had to be persuaded to limit his extravagance to funding a new sailors’ home. The prince met with the influential Parsi community and received an address in Pahlavi (ancient Persian) from its priests. The highlight, as such, of the six-day stay in the city was a banquet given to the prince in the Elephanta caves, then a dilapidated remnant of the ancient site of Hindu worship. Journalists from Calcutta sniped at the insensitivity of a military band playing for the guests a rendition of the ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’.22 On reaching Madras, the tour became even more crass. The prince arrived by train and joined a formal procession from the railway station to Government House. Passing by the crowds and through the triumphal arches the pecking order of the carriages revealed that Indian princes were deemed less important in this part of the country. The first four vehicles were occupied solely by the governor and his official colleagues, with the first native chief, the Raja of Travancore, one of Victoria’s most assiduous admirers, to be found only in the fifth carriage. In the days that followed there were the usual formalities including a banquet and municipal address to the prince, and also an address from native Protestant Christians, the only such memorial of a royal visit otherwise low on missionary gestures.23 Having completed his obligations in Madras, the prince rejoined his ship, bound for more hunting in Ceylon.
Most of Prince Alfred’s visit to India had gone to plan. Indian princes in the north had been gratified, and civic vanity in Bombay and Madras had been satisfied. The rules on gifts had not really worked. Mayo’s secretary, Owen Tudor Burne, was able to tot up the account so that presents in did not completely overwhelm presents out, but only by excluding from his calculations the Rewa diamonds and the Kashmiri shawls. The diamonds went into the toshakhana, and the prince took everything else home with him, putting some of the hoard on public display two years later. The prince’s gifts to the Indian princes – British-made watches, swords with a personalised inscription, stereoscopes and guns – were described by vernacular papers as mundane in comparison to the finery given to the prince. Also noted was the absence of any philanthropic gestures, with amends only being made as the prince left, by way of a donation sent for local schools in Bombay. There had been no budget for the trip, but whatever expenditure had been estimated was undoubtedly exceeded. Mayo contributed heavily from his own pocket towards the costs.24 The press had not been encouraged to attend. Mayo had invited along William Howard Russell, by then a veteran of reporting the Crimean war, the suppression of the Indian rebellion and the American Civil War, but he made his excuses. Outside of the main cities the prince’s route had been hard to follow, with the newspapers reliant on officials in the royal party for details of his whereabouts. Publicity stills were produced – 4,000 photos of Prince Alfred, but only as mementoes on his departure.25 However, Prince Alfred had made his mark and, more importantly, that of the queen. The Madras Times called him a ‘walking proclamation’. There were calls in India and in England for Alfred to be made viceroy.26 He was just happy to finally reach home. Four years later he married into the Russian imperial family. Less arduous, perhaps, than a trek around India, but equally effective as an act of royal diplomacy.
Shahzardah: The Prince of Wales in India, 1875–6
The visit of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, to India five years after his younger brother was a different kind of royal tour of India, in scale and in purpose.27 The Prince of Wales travelled for longer and went further. The tour lasted five months (eight including the voyages out and back), and took the heir to the throne – or Shahzardah as he became known – on a traverse of the Indian subcontinent. Placating the princes of northern India took less priority, and the western and the southern states and cities received equal treatment. It was a marathon and also a spectacle. Parliament provided £60,000 (around £2 million at today’s prices) to cover the prince’s expenses outside India, including the fitting out of his ship, the Serapis, and for presents for the native princes. The Government of India contributed another £30,000, much of it earmarked for the special train carriages commissioned for the journeys and the costs of security. In all the major towns visited by the prince, subscriptions averaging between £40,000 and £60,000 were raised to pay for civic entertainments, and vast amounts were also spent on the whitewashing of public buildings, and on improvements to princely palaces, temples and mosques. Together with the sumptuous hospitality and bejewelled court retinues of the Indian princes and chiefs, such an outlay made the prince’s India tour one of the most extravagant royal occasions of the Victorian era. As several historians have shown, it was certainly one of the best publicised.28 Facilitated by the spreading Indian railway network and the subterranean telegraph (which had reached India in 1869), the prince’s tour was extensively reported back in Britain and beyond. Veteran special correspondents William Howard Russell of The Times (The Times spent £10,000 alone on the trip) and William Simpson of the Illustrated London News, as well as up-and-coming newsmen such as G. A. Henty of the Standard, ensured almost daily coverage back home of the ceremonies, military display and sport.29 Russell’s reports were syndicated to the Chicago Daily Tribune, Henty’s to the New York Times. Curious and well-heeled types joined the tour at various points, and some who just missed it, for example Julia Stone, wife of the US Consul, wrote it up in apparently authentic travelogues as though they had been there.30 In India, the Prince of Wales was both hunter and hunted.
This level of media interest in the tour is unsurprising. The Prince of Wales was far more of a news story than his brother. The waywardness of his youth behind him, he was the centrepiece of London’s beau monde, and, during the queen’s long mourning, he had become the familiar face of the royal family, opening new buildings, supporting charities and travelling overseas through North America and the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, since his marriage in 1863, the Prince of Wales had become a focus of attention in India. Flouting official restrictions, Indian rulers had sent gifts at the time of his wedding to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Then, when the prince recovered from serious illness in 1872, the wave of thanksgiving services in India generated so many addresses from Indian states and municipalities that Queen Victoria was obliged to telegraph her gratitude.31 So from the moment information about the prince’s trip to India emerged in March 1875, editors, journalists and enterprising publishers fed anticipation of the event. The press was brought into the planning of the tour at an early stage, with The Times and the Illustrated London News given official accreditation, and Russell of The Times appointed as the prince’s ‘honorary private secretary’. The principal London newspapers and Reuters’ news agency vied for berths on the Serapis and inveigled their way into the hunting parties that were being organised for the prince.32 Ousted from the official tour, the Graphic published a special advanced issue about the Indian visit, just days after the prince had left London, describing sights and destinations that the prince was likely to see. Similarly, before he arrived in India, maps plotting the prince’s route were published in London – not always with complete accuracy.33 In India too, the tour drew attention soon after it was first announced. A Tamil biography of the prince was published in Madras. A new illustrated journal devoted to the trip – the Royal Tourist – was projected in Calcutta. From across India entries were sent into a princely poetry competition run from London by William Sparks Thomson, proprietor of the Crown Perfumery Company.34 Once started the frenzy did not stop. The entrepreneurial Calcutta Anglophile, Sourindro Mohan Tagore, prepared poetry and song, and portraits of the royal couple were circulated in Calcutta.35 All this before the prince had barely arrived.
The tour was much more than a media show, as compelling as that aspect of it may seem to the modern eye. In the first place, it was the prince’s show. Neither Disraeli nor Lord Northbrook, the viceroy, came up with the idea of a second princely voyage to India so soon after the first. Queen Victoria took a lot of persuading. An aspiring prince regent, Albert Edward had been champing at the bit for some time, wanting a larger share of the family business. The India branch attracted him. He shared his wish with Disraeli to go to India, and somehow The Times leaked the story of the planned visit in its 20 March edition.36 The queen was indignant that she had not been consulted. Faced with a fait accompli, she gave her ‘very unwilling consent’ to the trip, and over the next few months the Prince of Wales’s people talked with her people about arrangements.37 The queen had several objections. Firstly, she feared for the health of the prince, still delicate after his recovery from typhoid fever a few years earlier. Exposure to epidemic illness en route and in India, together with the hot climate even in the cool season, as well as the sheer intensity of the proposed itinerary, worried her. Dr Joseph Fayrer, formerly resident surgeon at Lucknow and Lord Mayo’s doctor, who had accompanied Prince Alfred on his tour, was selected as the Prince of Wales’s medical adviser, his first duty being to prepare a memorandum on the risks attached to the voyage out, around and into India.38 Secondly, the queen feared for the prince’s morals, not so much because of where he was headed, but because of whom he intended to take with him. The prince enjoyed louche company, and wanted some of the most louche to accompany him to India. The queen singled out three of his party as especially risqué: the Duke of Sutherland (‘devoid of all idea of etiquette’), Lord Carrington (‘his character
is not respectable’) and Lord Charles Beresford. But she deferred to Disraeli and all three were allowed to go. They were counter-balanced by the Bible and the sword. Robinson Duckworth went as chaplain (Queen Victoria thought him unnecessary as ‘there will be chaplains everywhere’), and General Dighton Probyn, veteran of the war of 1857–8, went too (‘distinguished & safe’). Fortunately, the queen did approve of the chief co-ordinator of the whole operation, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, the former governor of Bombay.39