by Miles Taylor
After six days in Delhi, the tour pushed further north, entering the Punjab capital of Lahore on 17 January. The by now familiar routine kicked in: a levée and a ball, principally for Europeans, a visit to the ‘Soldiers’ Industrial Exhibition’, and a fete in the Shalimar Gardens.79 Unlike in 1870, the Punjabi and Kashmir chiefs did not come to Lahore to meet British royalty. Instead, the prince went out to them. Travelling via Wazirabad, where he opened the ‘Alexandra’ railway bridge over the Chenab river, the prince went north to Jammu, entering the capital of Kashmir in an elephant cavalcade. The enemy felt very close. Russian-made goods were noticed in the bazaar. Alongside polo, acrobatics and a sacred dance performed by lamas, another mock battle was organised.80 The prince’s party now turned back east, via Lahore to Agra, calling at Amritsar and Patiala on the way. At Amritsar they visited the jail, and, at the prince’s suggestion, several prisoners were released as an act of royal clemency. At last he was behaving like a king-in-waiting. The prince also saw the Sikhs’ Golden Temple – temple and tank illuminated for the occasion – but declined to remove his footwear on entering the site. Just to prove he was a prince, if not an observer, of all faiths he also met with another missionary delegation.81
As the tour came towards the end of its third month, enthusiasm and energy was beginning to flag. One eyewitness to the prince’s Amritsar stopover found his manner peremptory. Physical fatigue and sports injuries were setting in too. The prince proved hardier than most of his companions, but even he succumbed to illness at the beginning of February. His physician was not surprised: ‘how can anyone keep well long in so much racket and fatigue,’ moaned Fayrer.82 Agra afforded some respite. A plush camp was pitched outside the town: tents equipped with furniture and fireplaces became the prince’s base for the next two weeks. From there he visited the town of Agra, entering astride an elephant as in Jammu. Two visits were made to the Taj Mahal, one by moonlight. From Agra he made a series of excursions: a day’s shooting in Bharatpur; a visit to Fatehpur Sikri to see the ruins of Akbar’s city, and, more significantly, to Gwalior and Jaipur, where the local rulers competed to impress their royal visitor. At Gwalior, Sayaji Rao, the maharaja, did not stint in his preparations. He constructed a completely new palace – the Jai Vilas Mahal – and the prince was his first guest. Arriving by carriage, the prince was met outside the city by his host and 14,000 troops, a reminder of the potency of his loyalty. The new palace was not quite finished – ‘Buckingham Palace repainted,’ gibed the Telegraph correspondent – but still the guests marvelled at the fittings.83 Anything Sayaji Rao could do, the Rajputana princes could do better. The tour returned to Agra, stopping in at Dholpur on the way, where another palace – in Italianate red sandstone – had been built just in time. From Agra the prince went back into Rajputana, heading for Jaipur, where there were no new palaces awaiting him. Instead the Maharaja of Jaipur had painted the city pink in readiness for the visit. There was no stopping the one-upmanship. Reaching Jaipur, past welcome signs in giant letters placed on the surrounding hills, and passing under a series of triumphal arches to the background noise of ‘God save the Queen’ played on whistles, the prince and his companions transferred from their carriages to howdahed elephants to enter the city, the stately procession caught for posterity in the enormous oil painting made by the Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin. Vereshchagin depicts the procession in daylight, but it was even more striking than that, for it was a torch-lit spectacle, taking place in the evening. The following day the prince laid the foundation stone of the Prince Albert Museum, the ceremony conducted from a podium over which a royal crest was suspended.84 Jaipur had also been selected for another hunting expedition, the press corps in contention to get the scoop of the prince’s first kill. As the prince enjoyed another assisted success – shooting down an already wounded animal – Reuters was the first to telegraph the news back to London, where it was taken as final proof that Edward was fit to be king. As one songster expressed it, ‘The hunting is over, the victory won! / The crown has been earned and everything done,’ and it went on: ‘He has won it by valour, no man about Town / Ever brought like the prince, a wild Elephant down / And now he must wear an Imperial Crown.’85
The tour now began to wind down. The prince and a smaller group went off to hunt for three weeks, firstly in the Terai, then they crossed the border into Nepal as the guests of Jung Bahadur, the prime minister, for more stalking and shooting. On 5 March the prince and his colleagues left Nepal, travelling back across Awadh by horse-drawn carriage to Lucknow. They paused to meet with the Nawab of Rampur at Pilibheet (Pilibhit). At Lucknow they rejoined the train, arriving in Allahabad on 7 February for the penultimate ceremony of the trip, a second investiture of the Star of India.86 There remained one more maharaja to see: Tukoji Rao II, the Maharaja Holkar of Indore. The prince travelled along the shiny new railways of his state to meet him. Then the party sped south to Bombay, where the smallpox was closing in, halting only for a farewell dinner with the governor, Philip Wodehouse. Afloat once more, the prince dashed off a thank-you letter to the people and princes of India, and, in a final act of modest munificence, donated money to local Bombay causes.87
On 11 March the Serapis, laden with wild animals, flora and fauna, left Bombay harbour and made its way home. As if he had not seen enough royalty already, the Prince of Wales called in on more en route, Isma-il Pasha of Egypt and the kings of Spain and Portugal. The Serapis finally docked at Portsmouth two months after leaving Bombay. The royal ladies were pleased to have the prince home, the Dean of Westminster gave thanks for his safe return, and the commodity culture spawned by the tour picked up where it had left off. The Serapis was opened up to the public, then the exotic menagerie was transferred to London Zoo. The hoard of gifts from the princes of India went on display at the South Kensington Museum, before an ‘Indian’ room was made for them at Marlborough House, the prince’s London home. Some of the journalists turned their copy into instant bestsellers.88
In terms of political capital at home, the Prince of Wales’s tour of India was a triumph. The heir to the throne had shed his reputation for lazy indifference, and proved more daring, diplomatic and dedicated than anyone had expected. In India, the effects of the prince’s visit were more mixed. Frere, designer-in-chief of the tour, told Queen Victoria that India had now fully submitted to imperial authority.89 Certainly, India had seen the heir to the throne, the present and future of the Raj had been viewed in person by thousands of Indians. As the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta concluded nothing had been quite so important as making visible the person of the monarch.90 The prince had fulfilled some Indian expectations too. His criticism of British officials and their rough handling of Indian chiefs in Bombay and at other stops later in the tour was widely reported. Newspapers picked up on his every small act of charity and compassion and highlighted them as examples of his princely virtue. Alongside this went the complaint that he was not being shown the real India, that he would be unable to inform the queen of the real plight of her Indian people. Writers from Bengal and Poona urged the prince to give a ‘correct account’ to his mother of what he had witnessed. The Hindoo Patriot urged him to ‘tell her that all that you have seen so glittering is not gold’.91 There was not much point being a royal messenger if he failed to deliver the message.
Heirs and Graces: The Later Tours
Although nothing quite so grand as the Prince of Wales’s tour ever happened again, a pattern was set for other royal tourists to follow. Later visits by members of Queen Victoria’s extended family went further and lasted longer, but they always had princely India at the centre of their itinerary, and they all included a spot of diplomacy alongside the hunting and bunting. The Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, Queen Victoria’s third son, was not merely a tourist, but a resident royal. In October 1883 he took command of the army at Meerut, moved on briefly to command at Rawalpindi in October 1885, before promotion to commander of the army in the Bombay presidency, a post he
held for four years.92 In effect, he was the only member of the royal family to serve in India during the queen’s lifetime, and in combining a civilian and military appointment in Bombay, the only royal to get a seat at the table of the Government of India.
The duke’s duties were predominantly military. However, in February 1884 he embarked on a tour of inspection to Agra and Mathura and coupled it with a hunting foray with the Maharaja of Bharatpur. Later that year he visited Kashmir. Although a ‘private visit’, he was received by various chiefs along the way through the Punjab.93 Then in 1885, the duke made the first of two decisive interventions in Indian foreign policy. In March he travelled to Rawalpindi in the Punjab to join the viceroy, Lord Dufferin, in his sensitive negotiations with the Emir of Kabul. Cajoled by gifts and cash, arms and men, the emir finally agreed to an alliance with the British. Adding the duke to the discussions helped to assure the emir that he was not being treated by the British as a mere feudatory prince, concluded the Times correspondent.94 Four years later the duke was despatched on a special trip to Hyderabad, specifically tasked with coaxing the nizam out of his cosy circle of courtiers and making him more accustomed to European visitors.95 The visit was an important step forward in relations between the British and the nizam. Before the trip, viceroys had remained wary of venturing to Hyderabad. After the duke had smoothed the path, they visited more regularly.
The Duke of Connaught also acted as chaperone for the last royal visit of India during the queen’s lifetime. In the winter of 1889–90, her grandson, Prince Albert Victor, made what proved to be the most extensive of all the princely tours of the period, his travels taking him from Travancore in the south to Burma in the east and as far north as Darjeeling at one end of the Himalayas and Rawalpindi at the other. Supposed to be the guest of the viceroy, sojourning in India on a private visit undertaken for the sake of his health and to take him away from the scandal sheets at home, Albert Victor’s tour eventually took on all the characteristic features of the earlier royal visits. At first all was unremarkable. Only eight Indian states had expressed any interest in meeting the prince.96 His ship was kept waiting in Bombay harbour for two hours before anyone realised it was there, and he disembarked to be met by a ‘beggarly array of empty benches and glaring yellow chairs’. Prince Albert Victor was whisked off to Poona, where his uncle, the Duke of Connaught took over hosting his visit to the presidency. There followed a meeting with the Indian rulers, and later with the Aga Khan, and sirdars from the Deccan and then, accompanied by the duke, the prince went to Hyderabad.97 Before 1889 no British royal had met the nizam; now two had come along to his kingdom in the same year. No expense was spared by the Hyderabad court to welcome their first ever heir to the throne, with £200,000 lavished on the occasion, highlights including a dainty dish (‘fluffy cakes’) set before the prince from which birds flew out.98
From Hyderabad the royal party travelled into Mysore, a state that had been left off his father’s tour. The prince caught up with the new Maharaja of Mysore in his ornate wooden palace, lit by electric light for the occasion.99 Then the party moved on to Courtallum (Kuttalum) in Travancore, travelling in a carriage specially made for the occasion, provided by the Raja of Travancore, a throne on hand in case the prince wanted to hold a durbar.100 There was a quick stop in Madras, then the prince became the first royal to visit Burma. The security situation was too tense to accommodate a ceremonial occasion, with the route from Rangoon to Pegu heavily policed. So the party moved on to Calcutta. Not that anyone was ready for them there. Preparations in Calcutta had been tardy too, with one government department passing responsibility for the visit to the city to another. The European community could not agree on how to fete the prince. In the end two maharajas – Darbhanga and Vizianagaram – came to the rescue, underwriting the costs of the occasion.101 Such occasions were few and far between. Prince Albert’s Calcutta itinerary involved almost exclusively European ‘official society’ with only a select band of Indians – the Maharajas of Cooch Behar and Darbhanga, Sourindro Mohan Tagore and the Nawab of Murshidabad – amongst the landing party. Although the viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, was adamant that many native gentlemen were anxious to see Prince Albert Victor, only one event, the quaintly named ‘Calcutta Community Fete’ on the Maidan, was set aside for the prince to meet Indians.102 In vain did one local address memorial ‘hope that His Royal Highness will kindly enquire into the condition of the dumb millions of the . . . Indian subjects’. Moreover, dissent was in the air. Students disrupted the proceedings of the welcome committee.103
Out of Calcutta, the tour resumed its routine aspect, and the prince fell back into the tracks left by his father and his uncle. There was more hunting around Benares, Nepal and Baroda. He made all the mutiny visits: to Lucknow and Kanpur, with veterans and survivors as his guides, and a tour of the site of the siege along the Delhi ridge. In the Punjab the ceremonies were more lavish: howdahed elephants at Lahore, military parade at Rawalpindi, a Sikh ceremony (a ‘christening’) at Amritsar, a durbar at Patiala.104 On the return trip family duties resumed. At Agra Queen Victoria requested that the prince call in on the father of Abdul Karim, her munshi (secretary); he entered Jaipur on an elephant just as his father had; and he unveiled a statue of the queen at Udaipur. By now Albert Victor was going through the motions, observing to his grandmother that ‘everyone was being nice to him’ only because he was a prince.105 As he returned to Bombay, the city was better prepared for his visit. The Indian National Congress and their republican guest, Charles Bradlaugh, had gone home. There was a week of festivities and civic ceremonies, including the laying of the foundation stone of a leper asylum funded by Dinshaw Petit.106 Then the prince resumed his tour, to Hong Kong and Japan, before returning home in the summer of 1890.
The tour of Prince Albert Victor fitted into the patterns established by Prince Arthur in 1869–70, and the Prince of Wales in 1875. However, there were some important differences. The large cities were kept at arm’s length. Bombay was bypassed at first as the meeting of the Indian National Congress was imminent, Madras only given a cursory nod, Calcutta carefully negotiated to keep the prince away from as many Indians as possible. Little was left to chance, lest the prince become embroiled in Indian politics. The Government of India had learned to be cautious.
Princely tours brought the British monarchy to India, putting Queen Victoria in touch, albeit indirectly, with the Indian people. There would be two more tours, one in 1905–6 and one in 1921. However, these visits never matched that of 1875–6. In 1905 Prince George, Duke of York, was tied up by protocol, and, in 1921, Prince Edward was parachuted into the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre, the trip dogged by boycott. The more that India became accessible to royal tourists, the less they saw of India. The Government of India wanted to show off the heir to the throne to princely India. But officials disliked mixing in monarchy with everyone else in India. The visit of Edward in 1875–6 was really the only occasion when a Prince of Wales was unleashed on British India, exposed to the towns and cities, and allowed to meet Indians. Even then Indian newspapers complained that he had not been shown the real India. In the end, only one person came to see royal tours as a key part of the Raj, and that was Queen Victoria. Her sons were fulfilling their father’s aspirations, turning India into a family affair, making the passage to India, whilst she remained at home. Was this not the way an empress was supposed to behave?
CHAPTER 8
QUEEN-EMPRESS
Not long after his death in 1881, Benjamin Disraeli featured on a Parisian cigarette card, depicted bowing before Queen Victoria as he conferred on her the title of Empress of India. The French always had a high estimation of Disraeli, but he could no more make Victoria an empress than he could communicate with Prince Albert in the afterlife.1 The queen’s new title required an act of Parliament. However, the idea stuck, and Disraeli has been credited ever since as the architect of the new imperialism at home, and overseas, decisively so in India. The imperial title, tog
ether with the purchase of shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 and the annexation of Cyprus in 1878, comprised a stroke of brilliant realpolitik by the ageing prime minister, protecting routes to the east and confirming the importance of India to British geo-politics. At the beginning of 1877, Lord Lytton, India’s new viceroy, hand-picked by Disraeli, proclaimed the new title of empress at an Imperial Assemblage in Delhi. For many the story of the British Raj starts here. All the ingredients are in place: a compliant monarch, a high-handed politician or two, exotic eastern spectacle and the people of India caught somewhere between abject homage and complete indifference.2 On closer inspection, the story is more complex. Queen Victoria wanted to be known as empress as much as Disraeli; in fact, she assumed the title was already a commonplace. Far from applying a masterly touch, Disraeli so mishandled the Royal Titles legislation in 1876 that politicians across the spectrum, from peers to republicans, opposed the measure. In India, in spite of Lytton’s flashy theatre, a more positive response emerged, as many Indians believed the switch from queen to empress would bring reform. In the end, Queen Victoria herself appreciated the change of nomenclature most. She marked the occasion with a new honours order for women in India, tested the reach of her new powers in Afghanistan and Egypt, and sent out her third son, the Duke of Connaught, to take on senior command in India.
