Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

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.

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.’