Empress

by Miles Taylor

  Then the queen had one further concern, overriding all others. People in India might think that the Prince of Wales was the monarch and not she. She refused to sanction any situation where the prince might take precedence over the viceroy, her representative in India. The prince was to travel not as her proxy, but as the ‘first subject of the realm’ and as the guest of the viceroy.40 This meant no durbars, nor any distribution of royal honours by or to the prince. She even refused to countenance the prince conveying a message from her to the people of India during his visit, and she did not like the idea of a commemorative medal being struck to mark the occasion.41 The prince was irritated by his mother’s interference, resenting the ‘sort of guardianship’ being assumed over him. The trip was his idea, and at the age of thirty-three he knew what he was doing, having consulted experts such as Fayrer and Frere.42 Nonetheless, although giving way on some of the detail – a silver medal, not a gold one, was issued – the queen held steadfast to her prerogative. The two durbars originally scheduled for Agra and Lucknow were cancelled. Careful arrangements were put in place to ensure that, at the Star of India investiture being organised for the Calcutta portion of the prince’s trip, he would be afforded only a secondary role. Most significantly of all, the viceroy had to tear up his own itinerary and start again. Lord Northbrook had planned to meet the prince at Calcutta, two months into the trip, and travel with him on the north-western section of the tour, before returning him to Bombay for his departure. This would have meant the prince arriving initially at Bombay and going straight into formal ceremonial visits with the Indian rulers, effectively as the queen’s representative. Instead, Lord Northbrook altered his diary, travelled to Bombay ahead of the prince’s landing there and spent an exhausting week making durbar with the Indian chiefs.43 In this way, the queen retained her top billing, and the Prince of Wales was kept in his place.44 Except that he was going to be in India, and the queen was not. Here lay another reason why the prince’s visit was such a watershed in the history of the Raj. He was a monarch in the making, the first heir to the throne to visit India, the ‘future Emperor’, and he had to be seen to be believed.45

  The prince’s tour was masterminded by Frere, whose modernising instincts had already made a huge difference to the city of Bombay. Now he looked backwards to find the future. Frere subscribed to the conventional Victorian stereotype of the Orient as feudal, somewhere where power was expressed through rituals of homage and deference. ‘Royalty should be seen in the flesh by the People of India’, his biographer explained. ‘The Eastern mind . . . seeks for a visible chief to bestow its allegiance, and cannot rest on the idea of power latent in a code or constitution.’46 Never mind that Bartle Frere’s Britain lacked a code let alone a written constitution, or that by 1875 many educated Indians were word-perfect in their knowledge of the queen’s 1858 proclamation, Frere stuck to his script and designed a tour programme that would reveal the body of the monarch-to-be across the length and breadth of India. He was not expected to say very much: he was advised that, unless he was fond of languages, there was no need to learn any Hindustani.47 But he could expect a packed engagement calendar. As news of the trip broke in India, invitations from the princely states began to flood in. In the larger towns and cities en route, Frere looked for opportunities for the prince to be associated with the burgeoning infrastructure of the Raj: opening docks and railways. The Government of India ordered a special railway saloon carriage to take the prince onwards from Calcutta, a vehicle notable for its extended balconies at each end, on which the prince could be seen as he steamed into and out of the stations. Making the prince so visible did carry the risk of leaving him an easy target. Frere ensured that his security was as detailed as possible, for example guards lined the whole route from Delhi to Lahore at regular intervals.48 Careful choreography was crucial to the trip’s success. Frere wanted as many people as possible to see the prince, and in as modern an environment as India could provide.

  By the time he left Britain for the voyage east, the Prince of Wales was carrying many expectations alongside his large entourage. What had started out as a ‘lark’ – the prince and his pals enjoying some hunting in between social calls on Indian maharajas – had assumed by the late summer the character of a ‘royal progress’, according to Disraeli. The queen remained sceptical to the last. She imagined scenarios in which the prince would have to abandon his tour: war with Russia, war with Prussia, even war with Burma. She expected the costs of the trip to sink the project once Parliament scrutinised the bill.49 In fact, the House of Commons, in a rare moment of generosity towards India, insisted that the Indian taxpayer be spared from paying all the prince’s expenses. Queen and Parliament assuaged, the final stages of preparations for the prince’s embarkation in October were made. The personnel of his tour party now ran in to double figures. An Indian troop ship, the Serapis, was requisitioned and fitted out for the journey, its crew numbering 499. Fifteen other vessels (including state barges and a state galley ship) travelled with the Serapis, thousands of visitors viewing the flotilla before it set sail.50 The prince was seen off by Lord Salisbury and with the blessing of the Dean of Westminster. Still no formal approval came from the queen. Her parting shot criticised the prince for not only leaving the Princess of Wales behind, alone, but also for not insisting that the princess come and live with the queen at Windsor during her husband’s absence. Last-minute arrangements were made for regular telegraphic communication between the royal couple – the princess was permitted to send fifty words per week – and on parting Edward gave Alexandra a gift of a carriage and four small ponies, possibly to hasten her escape if she was held captive by the queen.51 Alexandra went with him as far as Calais. Finally, at the end of September the prince set sail for the Mediterranean, calling in at Athens, Cairo and Aden, before crossing the Indian Ocean to Bombay.

  The self-styled second city of the Empire mounted an extravagant reception to welcome the prince on his arrival on 8 November. He certainly had a captive audience. The viceroy (Lord Northbrook), the governor of Bombay (Sir Philip Wodehouse) and the maharajas of Kolhapur, Udaipur and Cutch had been waiting the best part of two weeks. So too had two of the boy princes, the Maharaja of Mysore and the Gaekwar of Baroda, travelling outside their states for the first time.52 Northbrook had failed to coax another boy-prince, the Nizam of Hyderabad, out of his palace to come to Bombay, and caused offence when he sought medical proof that he was unfit to travel. Salar Jung, the prime minister, keen for a one-to-one with the Prince of Wales, came instead, probably what the Hyderabad court wanted all along.53 As for the Indian princes who did attend, strict instructions were laid down regarding the gifts they might bring and the number of armed retainers that could accompany them. They had been required to send on photographic portraits, and details of their family lineage and histories of their territories had been compiled for the purposes of the prince’s visit. Municipal bodies and civic associations in Bombay were warned that the prince should not be asked for subscriptions to any cause, nor petitioned about any matter. Street decorations for the welcome reception were provided by local prisoners.54 Despite all the protocol, the landing of the ship and procession brought out the crowds, one reporter estimating that there were over 200,000 people present. As the boat docked, the Indian princes gathered on the gangway. The prince alighted in military uniform, wearing a pith helmet. Transparencies lined his route into town, screaming Bombay’s recent progress, although it was another banner that caught the reporters’ eyes: a ‘Tell Mama we’re happy’ slogan draped over houses and shops in a Muslim neighbourhood of the city.55

  The Prince of Wales spent two weeks in Bombay. On his birthday – 9 November – he hosted a reception for the Indian princes at Government House, and on the following day he attended a levée at the governor of Bombay’s residence. Gifts were exchanged. A tea service from Baroda stole the show, although the Maharaja of Kolhapur’s presentation of a Maratha ceremonial sword from the seventeenth century was
perhaps more symbolic.56 Significantly, however, all this took place with the viceroy of India at the prince’s side. The exchanges that really mattered had taken place when the viceroy met with the Indian rulers in the days before the Prince of Wales arrived. The queen’s supremacy remained unaffected. His work done, the viceroy headed back north. The only event that the Prince of Wales presided over in an individual capacity was the laying of a foundation stone for the docks in Bombay harbour. He undertook this function on behalf of the Freemasons, of which he had become grand master the previous year. As the local lodge boasted, snubbing their fellow masons in Madras and Calcutta, it was ‘the only Masonic ceremony’ that the prince attended during his tour.57 But it was with a trowel and mortar in hand, not an orb and sceptre.

  After a short excursion to Poona, the prince’s itinerary now took an abrupt turn to avoid outbreaks of cholera across Mysore. The tour would continue by sea, direct to Ceylon via Goa, and then onwards by sea and rail to Madras. The revised route meant ‘extreme disappointment’ for many in the south, but it did provide the opportunity for some additional diplomacy.58 On 18 November, the prince’s party left Bombay for Baroda, 250 miles to the north, a trip laid on at short notice, partly at the behest of the acting regent, Madhara Rao, and the Maharani, the Gaekwar’s mother, anxious for a show of British paramountcy to help cement her infant son’s authority. Thousands of Indian workers were dragooned into preparing the town’s railway station and its thoroughfares, and also getting ready the area selected for the prince’s quail-hunting and pig-sticking on the return journey.59 The Baroda trip was the first application of the royal touch to the prince’s Indian tour. On arrival at the railway station he stepped up a silver ladder to get into the howdah mounted on an elephant, an ornamental umbrella held aloft over his head, as he rode alongside the Gaekwar’s elephant to the British Residency. As the Gaekwar’s guest he watched men wrestling and beasts brawling (buffaloes, elephants and rhinoceroses). Indeed the Prince of Wales spent more time in Baroda in the company of the animal kingdom than the human. Apart from a formal dinner at the Makarpura palace, at which the prince and Madhara Rao gave speeches, most of the mini-itinerary was given over to animal sports. That was partly the point. The rituals of hunting and animal fighting were a time-honoured way of affirming the regal status of both the newly enthroned Gaekwar and the visiting heir to the British throne.60

  Mission accomplished in Baroda and back in Bombay, the spruced-up Serapis was ready to sail again. A series of visitors came on board in the days before departure: more Indian princes, the Aga Khan, several members of the Jejeebhoy family, and Professor Monier-Williams, the latter seeking support for his planned Indian Institute in Oxford.61 The sea voyage took the tour party first to Goa, territory held by the Portuguese. Then, hugging the Malabar coast (although not too tightly as there was cholera onshore), the Serapis travelled south, arriving at Colombo, capital of Ceylon, on 1 December.62 Unlike India, Ceylon was a Crown colony, theoretically enjoying more self-government than its Indian neighbour. However, like the Indian mainland, Ceylon had experienced revolt. In 1848 martial law was proclaimed on the island after rebels restored the native Buddhist Kandyan monarchy. Almost thirty years on, colonial authority remained brittle.63 The Prince of Wales was enlisted to ramp up support for British rule. On disembarking he drove into town under triumphal arches. One was laden with fruit, another formed from two elephants on either side of the road, their raised trunks touching. Dinner with the governor, Sir William Gregory, was followed by a torch-lit elephant procession, as royal a reception as could be laid on.64

  The prince had come to Ceylon mainly to look for elephant, but first he was required to gaze over the relics of Ceylon’s departed monarchy. The governor journeyed with him to Kandy, the old royal capital in the centre of the island. There they viewed one of the Kandyan kings’ most sacred remains, the Buddha’s tooth. The prince and his companions took it all in with a mixture of disdain and levity. Dr Fayrer thought that the tooth was probably that of a seal, and the prince wound up Reverend Duckworth by asking him to converse with a Buddhist priest on the subject of nirvana.65 However, for Gregory, the visit helped dampen nostalgia for the old days of native monarchy. As he told Lord Carnarvon, the Kandyans ‘yearned for the visible presence of a king’. The visit of the prince had done just that: ‘[t]hey have no longer to deal with abstractions. They have seen the heir to the Crown.’66 By way of return, the prince got his elephants. More than 1,000 men had spent weeks preparing the site for the hunt at a camp outside Ruwanwella. After three days’ wait in heavy rain the prince finally cornered and shot his first elephant. Or rather a team of Ceylonese enticed the elephant from the trees, trapped and wounded the animal, leaving the prince to fire the fatal bullet – a metaphor for British rule in India, perhaps.67 The visit to the island ended back in Colombo with a levée and a ball at Government House. Then the Serapis made its way back across the sea to Tuitcorin (Thoothukudi). The prince opened a new railway branch and proceeded up the line to Tinnevelly for a flying call on the Christian missionaries there. Meeting the delegation on the railway platform, the prince was presented with a Tamil Bible.68

  The tour now turned north, making the long overland trip by train to Madras via Madurai. After the bustle of Bombay, and the humidity of Ceylon, Madras was cooler in every sense. The municipal authority had been parsimonious in their preparations. The prince was met at the railway station, the building covered in calico for the occasion, as though in a bed gown observed one of the party, and the rest of the town still seemed asleep. Indeed there was ‘hardly anyone to be seen’. Local journalists put their finger on the problem. No one knew which of the pith-helmeted pink Europeans was in fact the prince.69 Into this Madras malaise stepped the governor, the 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos. The duke and his three daughters (he had recently been widowed) now applied royal gilding. The duke suggested that the prince appear in public with a golden umbrella held over his head, to signal his state of majesty and to single him out from the white faces around him. The prince now made up for the earlier cancelled tour dates. Audiences were held for the Maharaja of Mysore and the Raja of Travancore, the Nawab of Arcot, and, from behind a screen, the Princess of Tanjore. Time was also squeezed in for the laying of a foundation stone for the new docks (local freemasons were invited to watch), and for a day at the races (with a spot of hunting) at Guindy.70

  The prince, with his golden umbrella, now headed to Calcutta, where he was due for Christmas and for the investiture of the Star of India on New Year’s Day. The Calcutta programme closely resembled what had taken place at Bombay. Rulers from northern India came to meet the prince, viewing from a platform as the ship drew up on the Maidan. The Burmese court sent a delegation too. Day one of the Calcutta stay was given over to visits from and exchanges of gifts with the Indian princes, and with a state banquet at Government House in the evening. It was the first time that any of the British press had come face to face with the more legendary ruling houses of India, and they made full use of the opportunity to exoticise them. Bourne and Shepherd, the leading firm of Calcutta photographers, were also on hand to capture the occasion.71 The prince was expected to match the princes with a stylish flourish of his own. A portable teak throne finished in silver was provided for him at Calcutta. But he declined, preferring to sit on a sofa when receiving the Indian rulers. After a brief interlude for Christmas Day, the packed calendar resumed. There was a visit upriver to Barrackpore, to pay respects at the Canning memorial. On 28 December there were return visits made to the Indian princes, and then the whole world seemed to turn up at the governor’s levée; over 200 presentations were made to the prince, including some of the grandsons of Tipu Sultan, the British Indian Association of Calcutta (the zamindars’ lobby), and the Calcutta lodge of the freemasons, the latter affronted that they had to stand in line to meet him. Other stops on his Calcutta visit, although scripted, were harder for the British authorities to control. The prince attended a ‘native
entertainment’ at Debendranath Tagore’s house at Belgatchia and also visited Calcutta University, where he collected an honorary degree. There were two visits to the racecourse, one to watch a polo match.72

  On 1 January, starting at 8 a.m., the main event of the Calcutta visit took place: the Star of India investiture. It was the only occasion during the tour when the prince acted in the name of the queen, and it was a grand affair. Each of the new knights were given their own tent, from which they emerged one after another to be admitted into the order, the Prince of Wales pinning the star and riband onto their robes.73 That ceremony over, the prince rushed off to unveil an equestrian statue of Lord Mayo, return to the racecourse, dine at Government House and close out the first day of 1876 with a trip to the theatre. During the dash across the city, an Indian approached the prince’s carriage and managed to throw something into the royal lap. It turned out to be a missive and not a missile, an Indian petitioner managing to skirt the security.74

  Boarding the prince’s special train for the first time, the tour party left Calcutta and turned north-west, across Bengal to Bankipur. At Bankipur indigo workers tried to petition the prince but were turned back. Then on to Benares, where the Maharaja of Benares hosted his visit at Ramnagar, presenting the prince with a copy of his translation of the queen’s Highland journals, and another royal accessory: a gold walking stick.75 More regalia came his way at Lucknow, the next stop, as the Taluqdars of Awadh gave him their crown. Now he was looking like a royal. There were mutiny memories too: an inspection of army veterans from the siege of Lucknow, a visit to the memorial at the Residency and, a few days later, a service at the memorial church at Kanpur.76 History and memory combined with even more force at Delhi, reached on 11 January. A crowded procession led the prince from the railway station to his tented camp on the ridge above the old city. There was a ball in the peacock chamber of the Red Fort and a dinner in the zenana court. Just to rub in British superiority six grandsons of the ex-King of Delhi were presented to the prince.77 Delhi had been chosen for the first major military show of the tour. On 12 January the prince led a review of 20,000 troops, organised by Major Frederick Roberts, followed two days later by a reconstruction of the offensive against the rebel soldiers back in 1858.78 It was an important statement of British military might, reliving the heat of the battle that had decisively seen off the last serious challenge to British power.