Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Large crowds cheered his progress from the Bombay docks to Government House and energetically waved banners on which were written such friendly mottoes as ‘Tell Mama We’re Happy’. The Times reported a few days later:

  There can no longer be any doubt of the extraordinary effect which the visit of the Prince of Wales has produced in India. From the moment the Prince set foot on the shores of India there has been one continuous demonstration, surpassing all that could be expected or imagined of an Asiatic people. It was not only the Princes and Chiefs who assembled to welcome him, but the whole population of Bombay swarmed along the road, and as the royal procession slowly made its way through the dense masses which rose from the ground to the housetops … a welcome was given such as an Indian city has seldom seen.

  From Bombay the Prince went on to Poona and Baroda, then to Goa and Ceylon, Madras and Calcutta. After Christmas at Barrack-pore, he travelled northeast to Lucknow. He went to Delhi in January, then north again to Lahore, then on to Agra, Jaipur and Nepal. He reviewed parades of native troops; inspected buildings and railways, coffee and cocoa mills; he visited prisons and the palaces of princes; he attended firework displays and banquets; held durbars, receptions and levees; he watched army manoeuvres and led his own regiment, the Tenth Hussars, in a simulated cavalry charge. He presided at a chapter of the Star of India and admitted several princes to the Order. At Benares he inspected the Maharajah’s palace where the sofa on which he sat was afterwards pointed out to visitors with great reverence. ‘A broad space (half the sofa) was covered carefully with tissue paper,’ Grey noted in his journal, ‘and thus the impress of the royal and broad seat of H.R.H. is ever hereafter to be preserved as a holy and sacred relic.’

  At Kandy, so the correspondent of the Times of India reported, he ‘seemed highly pleased with the novel, splendid and peculiar’ cavalcade which was presented for his entertainment.

  First came about thirty men in rich dress beating the tom-tom and blowing (for it cannot be called playing) a sort of squealing, ivory-necked pipe. These were followed by forty elephants, not painted (as at Baroda) but richly caparisoned in cloth of gold or other equally brilliant covering. On every elephant were men waving fans and banners, and each animal also bore a richly decorated howdah which contained the arms and other relics of the gods … As each elephant approached the Prince it was made to do obeisance either by kneeling or crouching which His Royal Highness rewarded by feeding the monsters with sugar cane … At intervals were dancers, who, though they looked very much like women, were, I am assured, men.

  They all wore bells and bangles; some sang ‘strange, weird’ songs; others turned somersaults; a few were covered with bright steel armour and wore ‘helmets with faces of devils’.

  At Delhi, Albert Grey recorded, ‘a vast crowd of mingled races were herded in silent expectation … on the magnificent mountain of stairs [which] approached the gate of the mosque … At the Prince’s approach they all arose at the same moment as if by instinct … like a flight of birds.’

  The day before he arrived in Madras, readers of the Native Public Opinion were advised:

  The advent of the Prince is an important event, and it is one which must be celebrated with rejoicings by all classes. The distinction between the conquering and the conquered must be forgotten at least for the time being … Our complexions, costumes, manners, usages and religions are different. We have yet one thing in common … We are all free-born British subjects.

  The rather admonitory tone of the article was unnecessary. The Prince’s welcome in Madras was unrestrained, the enthusiasm of the people ‘past all description’. The Madras Mail reported:

  He appears in evening dress to even better advantage than in his field marshal’s uniform. He has grown stout of late years, and looks therefore somewhat older than thirty-four, especially as, like his father, he is threatened with premature baldness. But his face is his fortune. He has a winning smile that delights both sexes and all classes … It is gratifying to see how much the natives of high rank have been struck by what they rightly call his affable manner.

  His suite were equally pleased with him. ‘His health, courage, spirit, tact and power of memory have been wonderful,’ Lord Carrington wrote home. ‘He has proved himself a man in 100,000 … He wins golden opinions wherever he goes.’ He ‘is always so kind and thoughtful’, Lady Frere assured Albert Grey’s mother; while Grey himself wrote:

  Everyone here is fascinated with H.R.H. … and his amiable manners … ; both natives and Europeans comparing him with the Duke of Edinburgh [who had visited India a few years before] and Lord Northbrook in a manner that is by no means favourable to these last … He is never idle for a moment and [exists] on a small allowance of sleep that would make children of many men… Everything he has had to do, he has done with such courtly dignity that he has at all times commanded the respect at the same time that he has enlisted the affection of those present … He is most particular in always being most civil to those whom he hears are deserving of notice from the trouble they have taken on his behalf … He gives them all a few kind words of thanks coupled with a little offering as a keepsake.

  There was, however, a problem with these presents which — as had been feared in England — were far less valuable than those he received in return. Indeed, the idea was generally prevalent that the Prince’s gifts were ‘inadequate and of deficient value’. But when the Prince’s suite mentioned this to the Viceroy, he ‘disagreed altogether’, maintaining that ‘the value of the presents received by the Prince would not exceed much over £40,000’ and that the value of the presents given by him would amount to the same figure. ‘Of course,’ Grey commented, ‘a Viceroy’s statement should be accepted as final … and he will be in the House of Lords next session to support his statement … yet at Madras [alone] the value of presents given to H.R.H. — £20,000 [while] those given by H.R.H. — £8,000.’

  The Prince was not to blame for this. But he was culpable, Grey had to admit, in paying insufficient attention to the susceptibilities of Europeans who clung to the ‘dignity of precedence’ with ‘a rigidness almost inconceivable to the home-confined Englishman’. The wife of the Collector, for example, was ‘a bigger swell’ than the wife of the Deputy Collector, since every woman ranked in life ‘according to the salary and position of her husband’.

  The head woman therefore thinks [Grey noted in his journal] — and her whole training has made it part of her creed which she thoroughly believes in — that if any woman in the station in which she reigns supreme is to receive any honour, undoubtedly and assuredly it is to be she. Accordingly when the Prince came to India every old Commissioner’s wife assured herself that — [even if she looked] like a housekeeper — she would be the woman who could boast hereafter of having valsed with the Prince. The Prince comes. He opens the ball with a duty dance — that done, in his opinion, duty has been done, too. Conversation with local bosses all day has not made him particularly anxious to continue conversation with local bosses’ wives, particularly as they look frumpy and dull. His eyes search round for youth, a sparkling eye, a laughing mouth and a merry face, and not finding them in the Commissioner’s wife, he at last discovers them in the wife of the Commissioner’s underling, Jones, the junior clerk. Mrs Jones becomes famous for the evening by the royal attention bestowed upon her, and wins a short-lived position of envy, to be hated ever hereafter by the Commissioner’s wife. And this perhaps is the reason why poor honest Jones, who besides being pitied most unrighteously for having so giddy and fast a wife, is retarded in obtaining his promotion, and lingers on on small pay long after his bachelor contemporaries are comfortably provided for.

  Grey said hat he had heard ‘cries of protest from the mighty’ in Benares, Lucknow, Delhi and — loudest of all — in Calcutta, where society was particularly angry with his Royal Highness and, Grey was ‘sorry to say, not without reason’. His hostess there, Lady Clarke, had invited ‘all the Calcutta swells who were pining for
royal notice … so the dinner was more official than private. Calcutta appreciated this fact, not so the Prince,’ who asked that the comedian, Charles Mathews, who was appearing there in the farce, My Awful Dad, should be asked to join the party with his wife after dinner. Mathews left the theatre in the middle of the performance, explaining that the abrupt termination of the piece was ‘inevitable in consequence of a royal command’. And soon afterwards, he arrived at Lady Clarke’s with his pretty wife, Lizzie, who had been an actress at Burton’s Theatre, New York. The Prince immediately retired ‘with Mrs Mathews to the verandah and sat there chaffing and smoking cigarettes from directly after dinner until 2 a.m. — the official Indignants kicking their feet in impatient and envious rage, not thinking it respectful to go before the Prince. Calcutta was furious at this.’

  Fortunately there were no more than hints about the Prince’s neglect of his social duties in the newspapers, and he continued to enjoy his tour with undiminished zest. He wrote rather boring letters to his mother, and more lively, ill-spelled ones to his sons, telling them of the maddening jungle leeches which ‘climb up your legs and bight you’ and of the fights between wild animals which were staged for his entertainment, making these sound far less unpleasant than most European spectators found them. His former gloom now quite dispelled, he was unfailingly cheerful and tirelessly energetic, showing less susceptibility to the heat and sun, according to Bartle Frere, than any member of his suite, yet causing constant anxiety to the Queen, who, convinced that he was overdoing things, dispatched telegram after telegram urging him to take more care of himself.

  As those who knew him might well have predicted, to no activity did he bring more zest than big-game hunting. He killed wild pigs and cheetahs, black bucks, elephants, jackals, bears and several tigers, two of them over ten feet long. One day in Nepal, in a forest where the local ruler had assembled 10,000 men to act as servants and beaters, he shot six tigers from the vantage of a howdah, some of them ‘very savage’, so he told his sons, and two of them man-eaters. On another occasion he ‘shot an elephant and wounded severely two others’, he announced by telegraph to the Queen. He thought at first that he had also killed one of the wounded ones which fell to the ground. He cut its tail off, as custom required, while Lord Charles Beresford danced a hornpipe on its back; but it suddenly ‘rose majestically and stalked off into the jungle’.

  The tail was taken back to England, when the Serapis steamed out of Bombay on 13 March, together with an extraordinary variety of other trophies including seven leopards, five tigers, four elephants, a Himalayan bear, a cheetah, two antelopes, two tragopans, three ostriches, an uncertain number of heads which Mr Bartlett was kept busy stuffing, skins and horns, orchids and other rare plants, countless presents from Indian princes — precious stones, necklaces, anklets, gold bangles, carpets, shawls, teapots, cups and ancient guns — a Madras cook, expert in the preparation of curry, two Indian officers as additional aides-de-camp, and, for the Queen, a copy of her Leaves from the Journal of My Life in the Highlands translated into Hindustani with covers of inlaid marble.

  The Prince’s tour, Sir Bartle Frere assured the Queen, had however borne fruits far more valuable than these. The Prince, who had behaved perfectly throughout — and was warmly commended by Lord Salisbury — had succeeded in winning the affection and regard of the ordinary people of India as well as the respect of the princes. He had made an impression of ‘manly vigour and power of endurance’ and had encouraged Indians to believe that he stood to them in the same relationship as that in which he stood to the British.

  The Times confirmed:

  If there were any doubts as to the success of the visit these have been completely dissipated, and even those who are least disposed to attach much importance to courtly vanities recognise that in the particular circumstances of India, and having regard to the character of its princes and people, the visit of the heir of the British crown is likely to prove a great political event.

  It certainly had one good result. What struck the Prince ‘most forcibly’, he told his mother, was the ‘rude and rough manner with which the English “political officers” ’ treated the native chiefs. The system was much to be deplored, for Indians of all classes would be more attached to the British if they were ‘treated with kindness and with firmness at the same time, but not with brutality or contempt’. ‘Because a man has a black face and a different religion from our own,’ he added in a letter to the Foreign Secretary, ‘there is no reason why he should be treated as a brute.’ And to Lord Salisbury, he later strongly protested about the ‘disgraceful habit of officers … speaking of the inhabitants of India, many of them sprung from the great races, as “niggers” ’.

  The Prince’s protests were not unavailing. Instructions were sent out to check the arrogance of those army officers and civil servants whose attitude towards Indians the Prince deplored; and one of them, the Resident in Hyderabad, was recalled ‘in consequence of his offensive behaviour to princes and people’. Some years afterwards the new Viceroy’s efforts to maintain a more sympathetic attitude towards the people of India by British officials was, so Lord Salisbury commented ironically, attributed to the ‘malign influence of the Prince of Wales’.

  The Queen warmly supported the Prince on this issue, but while he was on his way home another issue came between them and threatened to drive them apart once again. This was the Royal Titles Bill which passed its third reading in the House of Commons on 7 April and proposed to confer on the Queen the additional title of Empress of India. Neither his mother nor the government had troubled to let the Prince know of this measure; and, ‘as the Queen’s eldest son’, he felt he had ‘some right to feel annoyed’ that the first intimation he had had of the subject should have come from a column in a newspaper. When the Prime Minister made the lame excuse that he did not know the Prince’s address and endeavoured to placate him by suggesting that he might receive an additional title himself such as Prince Imperial of India, he brusquely replied that he was quite content with the titles he already possessed. And although he readily accepted the apologies offered him; although he assured his mother that on his return to England he had ‘not the slightest wish but to receive Mr Disraeli in the kindest manner possible’; and although subsequently — without complaint — he assumed the title of Emperor of India himself, the slight to which he had been subjected rankled with him to such an extent that on his mother’s death he initialled documents ‘E.R.’ rather than follow the example of the Queen, who had written ‘V.R.I.’ There was, however, another matter on his mind at the moment far more disturbing than this.

  10

  Exclusion

  The Prince of Wales has no right to meddle and never has done so before.

  Some weeks before his return to England, while in camp on the Sardah River, the Prince learned that his friend Lord Aylesford had received a short letter from his wife announcing her intention of eloping with the Duke of Marlborough’s eldest son, the Marquess of Blandford. It transpired that the Marquess had, with Lady Aylesford’s ‘knowledge and sanction’, obtained a key to her house where he had ‘passed many nights with her.’

  On hearing of his wife’s intentions Lord Aylesford had left for England immediately, ‘broken hearted at the disgrace’, according to Lord Carrington, but comforted by the Prince’s sympathy and his outspoken denunciation of Blandford as ‘the greatest blackguard alive’.

  It was natural that the Prince should support his friend. But Aylesford, though he had written perfectly friendly letters to his wife from India, had long since ceased to display much affection for her; and his mother, so the Duke of Marlborough was informed, seemed ‘to impute some at least of the blame to her son’. His reputation according to Lady Aylesford’s brother, Owen Williams, was most ‘unsavoury’.

  Lord Blandford’s reputation, in fact, was not much better. His sister-in-law, Lady Randolph Churchill, considered him ‘worthless’; while Churchill himself, though he came to his elder b
rother’s defence at once, reached the conclusion before the affair was over that Blandford, clever and eloquent as he was, was nevertheless ‘a horrid bore’.

  On his arrival home, Lord Aylesford, who was determined to divorce his wife and was dissuaded with difficulty from challenging his rival to a duel, let it be known in society exactly what the Prince of Wales’s opinion of Blandford was. Provoked by these reports, Lord Randolph insisted that the Prince was nothing but a hypocrite: he had known all about his brother’s love for Lady Aylesford but this had not prevented him from issuing a pressing invitation to Lord Aylesford to accompany him on the Indian tour despite Lady Aylesford’s pleas that her husband should stay behind for fear of what she might be tempted to do in his absence. Lady Aylesford, in fact, had offered no objection to her husband’s accompanying the Prince but was now alarmed by the consequences of her passion for Blandford and recoiled from the prospect of a scandalous divorce. So she gave Blandford a bundle of extremely imprudent letters, ‘containing improper proposals’, which she had received from the Prince of Wales when he himself had been flirting with her in a relatively light-hearted way a few years before. Blandford, ‘wildly infatuated’ with Lady Aylesford, passed them on to his brother, Lord Randolph, who threatened to make them public if the Prince of Wales did not use his influence with Lord Aylesford to stop his divorce proceedings. Lord Randolph, accompanied by Lady Aylesford and Lord Alington, ‘an excitable man worked on by Lady Aylesford’s sisters’, went so far as to call upon Princess Alexandra to warn her what would happen if the Prince refused to cooperate.