Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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.