Royal tourists, colonial subjects and the making of a British world, 1860–1911

Front matter

Pay Me, sie “ARs

ROYAL TOURISTS, COLONIAL SUBJECTS AND THE MAKING

OF A BRITISH WORLD, 1860-1911

Contents

Acknowledgements—viii List of abbreviations—x Prologue: Chief Sandile encounters the British Empire—xi Introduction—xvii

British royals at home with the empire Naturalising British rule

Building new Jerusalems: global Britishness and settler cultures in South Africa and New Zealand

Chapter One

We were so frightened to hear that our husbands were going to war.... We had no slight idea what the war was about, the thing is, we only heard that Queen [Victoria] has asked for help, so they are going to fight for the Queen. We then know that this involves us, if they [the Germans] are fighting the Queen, as we were her people. We were under her, and she helped us against our enemies and with other things, so we had to help her. We didn’t know how long they were going to take there. Even if we were afraid we just encouraged them to go in the name of God, we will also pray for them whilst gone, so that they can help the Queen as she helped us.

Miriam Pilane of Bechuanaland, post-war interview!

As Miriam Pilane saw it, the Tswana-speaking peoples of southern Africa were motivated to serve the British war effort during the Second World War because of their loyalty to a long-dead British Queen. While her invoking of the Great White Queen was, at some level, simply an instance of confusion, it also demonstrates the longevity of Queen Victoria as a symbol of British justice and benevolence, the image carefully nurtured by colonial officials and imperial stakeholders of the Queen as the mother of empire. Despite anti-colonial movements of the interwar period and imperial betrayals from the Union of South Africa to the Amritsar Massacre, this image managed to survive, a testament to the effectiveness of imperial propaganda.

Through the ideological work of colonial officials, Queen Victoria’s subjects across the empire imagined her to be a justice-giving imperial mother. There are perhaps more statues of Victoria on earth than of any other non-religious figure in history. She sits or stands among whizzing automobiles in Auckland, in front of neo-Gothic facades in Mumbai, and near the waterfront that bears her name in Cape Town - in bustling metropolises and provincial towns, near churches, mosques, and temples. In 1876, using the successes of the Prince of

Wales’ tour of India in 1875-76, she persuaded Disraeli to style her Empress of India, an event celebrated by a royal durbar in Delhi. Her children and grandchildren travelled extensively through the empire. Her son Edward was the first Prince of Wales to visit the empire. Her grandson as King George V would become the first reigning monarch to visit the empire. As David Cannadine has argued, the empire lent itself to a monarchy in need of cultural refashioning, and the monarchy in turn gave itself to the empire.” Place names, monuments, and royal visitors all commemorated this developing solidarity, through which the ‘imperial monarchy intruded itself into the individual lives and collective consciousness’ of its subjects.’ During her lifetime, Victoria was a ubiquitous symbol of Britain and its empire, made real to people across the world through images, statues, and visits. Her image as a maternal and justice-giving Queen was disseminated, used, and appropriated by her subjects in Britain and abroad — politicians, administrators, settlers, and local people — to various ends.

Yet the reality of the Great Queen was rather different. The ornamentalism described by Cannadine, and the willing role played by the monarchy in it, was an imperial fantasy. Indeed, Victoria’s attitudes to royal visits to the empire reflect a certain ambivalence and reluctance about empire that contrast sharply with the mythology. While Victoria relished Benjamin Disraeli’s efforts to title her as the imagined heir to the Mughal emperors, for instance, in most other respects she played a limited and sometimes resistant role in the cultivation of her imperial image.* On multiple occasions, she rejected proposals from her colonial subjects for a royal visit, insisting that family and the monarchy’s duties at home came first. Even when she allowed the royal tours to go ahead, her journals and correspondence about and during the tours focus on matters closer to home — that her children and grandchildren were developing into dutiful and useful young men and, above all, that they returned home safely. For her, the empire was an accepted part of life, but it was — outside of moments of national-imperial crisis — of limited or superficial interest. As an examination of the royal tours will demonstrate, Queen Victoria’s participation in crafting and disseminating a vision of imperial culture that centred on her person was surprisingly limited and often unwilling.

In the end, however, her resistance to royal visits was almost always overcome, circumvented, or ignored. As this chapter demonstrates, royal tours went on with or without her blessing, and it appears that she sometimes agreed in the end simply to save face. She could not be the Great White Queen, for she lacked the political power — the efficient capacities of Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution — to do much more than advise, even in matters that involved her children and grandchildren. On the public stage, she played the role masterfully, but she struggled, unsuccessfully, to manage the production behind the scenes. While her resistance to part with her children and grandchildren was likely personal, particularly after the death of Albert, rather than an act of rebellion against her own political impotence, she either truly believed herself to be the master of the monarchy or simply could not accept the purely symbolic role that later monarchs would embrace.

As for the royal children, they were generally bored by royal rituals and offer us limited reflections on their colonial encounters. Even as they sat in hunting camps in the Punjab or greeted cheering subjects in Cape Town or Auckland, they rarely wrote of the empire in their correspondence home. When they did, they often complained of the tedium of their ritual duties and encountered empire with a tourist’s sense of distance. For royal tourists, the royal tour was a quotidian practice, a job. In time, however — through experiences in the empire — a younger generation of royals came to accept their ceremonial place in imperial culture without the struggle for political power put up by Victoria and Albert. Through these processes, the invented tradition of the 1860s and 1870s became the standardised ritual practices of the twentieth century.

This chapter aims to understand how Victorian royals thought and talked about the empire through the lens of the royal tour. As a whole, the Victorian royal family was deeply and profoundly ambivalent about the British Empire. Victoria’s consort Prince Albert and her grandson George, the future George V, were the most important exception to this observation. After Albert’s demise in 1861 and a decade of mourning, Queen Victoria consistently resisted the royal tours. She unsuccessfully struggled to assert her royal prerogative and to control her image, which had been, by that point, almost fully appropriated by officials at home and the empire as well as by her colonial subjects around the world. Her children, on the other hand, were at home with empire. It was the background, the mise-en-scéne for other adventures away from controlling parents and escapes from the tedium of royal duties. That the empire was quotidian for them reflects an acceptance of its normality as part of British and royal life. For future generations of royals — represented in this chapter by Albert Edward’s second son George — the royal tour as developed and perfected by the Victorian generation was embraced as a standard practice and duty. Educated principally in and about the empire, rather than the Continent, tutored by Joseph Chamberlain, and coming of age in an era of perceived imperial crisis, the future George V accepted and embraced the dignified functions of the empire without his grandmother’s struggle for political power, on one hand, or bereaved ambivalence, on the other. In the end, perhaps despite themselves, Victorian royals invented the truly imperial monarchy of the twentieth century.

Inventing the Great Queen

Long before the ‘imperial turn’ in British history and his work in Ornamentalism, Cannadine radically reconceptualised the meaning of royal ritual in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition.’ Writing in the early 1980s, when the modern Elizabethan monarchy was experiencing a period of unpopularity stemming from a series of family controversies, Cannadine sought to understand how the monarchy emerged from a transformative age of political reform as a popular symbol of nation and empire. For Cannadine, the answer was to be found in the ritual functions of the British monarchy, what Walter Bagehot had called the dignified powers of the Crown. He identified ‘theatrical show’ to be ‘central in explaining the emergence of popular monarchy’ during the nineteenth century, which ‘shap[ed] a national identity based on tradition, hierarchy, and peculiarity’.° Under Victoria, then, the monarchy embraced a newfound raison d’étre, to ceremonially perform as a symbol of the British nation-empire.

Queen Victoria, Cannadine argues, was fundamental to this reinvention of the British monarchy. Victoria’s eventual willingness to come out of mourning and embrace her public duties in the 1870s helped transform the monarchy into a ‘symbol of consensus and continuity to which all might defer’.’? Within Cannadine’s chronological frame, the golden age of royal ceremony began after 1876, when Victoria became Empress of India. The Golden (1887) and Diamond (1897) Jubilees represented high-water marks in this symbolic reinvention, during which the monarchy was celebrated in grand style in Britain and across the empire. Thus, the last decades of the nineteenth century were, he argues, ‘a time when old ceremonials were staged with an expertise and appeal which had been lacking before, and when new rituals were self-consciously invented to accentuate this development’.®

Twenty years after his Invention of Tradition essay, as a younger generation of royals has embraced their ceremonial roles, Cannadine’s argument about the British monarchy is more persuasive than ever. While it is true that royal ritual was not entirely new to the British monarchy — one need only revisit Elizabeth I’s royal progresses to realise this fact — they were underused and largely out of practice by the time the young Victoria came to the throne in 1837.? If Victorian ceremonials had roots in the past, they were used in a new context and for new reasons. The royal tours, for instance, were made possible by the steamship and the railway, on which young royals could travel in safety and comfort, and their images and narratives were transmitted over telegraph wires to engage the readers of a burgeoning popular press in Britain and the colonies.

The British monarchy then and now has sought to project itself not only as ancient and timeless, and therefore indispensable to national identity, but also as modern and useful. For Victoria and Albert as well, making the monarchy a modern and useful national-imperial institution informed how they raised their children and grandchildren. For them, as this chapter shows, the royal tours were often as much or more about instilling the importance of national service in their children as they were about consciously embracing the imperial role of the monarchy.

The Queen/Mother

To suggest the limits of Queen Victoria’s imperial consciousness is not to say that she did not care about her empire. As her extant letters demonstrate, she was a prolific writer on imperial affairs, particularly during the decades before Prince Albert’s death (1861) when he served as her de facto personal secretary and exerted political influence over his wife and colonial affairs. Over the course of her long reign, Victoria wrote to prime ministers, colonial secretaries, and colonial governors frequently. She loudly voiced her (often unsolicited) approval or disapproval of colonial policies to the government, writing an average of 2,500 words on every day of her adult life.!° She tried to learn ‘Hindoostani’, corresponded with several South Asian princes, and employed a trusted Indian servant named Abdul Karim."! She even adopted a Maori child as her godson after his parents, the Ngapuhi chief Hare Pomare and his wife Hariata, lamented the death of Albert.!? And, after becoming Empress of India, she insisted on signing her name as ‘Victoria RI’, that is Regina Imperatrix or Imperial Queen.

At the same time, her relationship with the empire was more ambivalent and complicated than these examples suggest. Her imperial interests focused on India, and the vast majority of her letters on foreign affairs are on the subject of Europe. When she wrote to her globetrotting children and grandchildren, she very rarely discussed imperial politics, focusing her attention on family, marriages, and children. Her private journals lament the absence of her children and rarely reflect on the larger implications of the tours for the monarchy or the empire.

And after the death of her beloved husband Albert, her interest in governance and policy wavered significantly, to be rekindled during the 1870s by political and public pressure. Even then, she, like the British public, rediscovered the empire during periods of crisis. Despite her outward interest in empire, she was always reluctant to allow her children and grandchildren to take long journeys abroad." For her, family and the domestic duties of the monarchy came first.

Her ubiquity across the British world as a symbol of Britain and ‘her’ imperial dominions largely reflected an effort by government and colonial officials to use her image to their own ends, rather than any ideological work on her part. Victoria could certainly be described as an imperialist, if of the banal variety. She was fascinated by India, but mostly out of nostalgia for Albert, who himself demonstrated a keen interest in the subcontinent. While she did write prolifically on imperial affairs, particularly during crises, she was far more interested in European politics.

Colonial propaganda presented her as the maternal and justice-giving Great Queen, an idea many dispossessed peoples clung to well into the twentieth century. She was frequently visited by colonial subjects and did, at times, exhibit a strong interest in their welfare. Walter Arnstein argues that she demonstrated a brand of Victorian multiculturalism, seeing ‘herself far less as the head of a homogenous nation-state than as the head of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Empire’ and ‘insist[ing] time and again that other traditions and religions and even rulers in the Empire deserved respect’.!> At the same time, she believed that the expansion of British rule (rather than German, French, or Russian) would serve to push civilisation forward. As a constitutional monarch, she had little power to live up to her mythology as the Great Queen, defender of subject peoples, and did not choose to spend what little political capital she had on defending her subjects.

With the exception of Ireland in 1849 and 1900, Queen Victoria never visited her empire.!° She did travel around the British Isles and to the Continent extensively. Because of these limits, one useful way to truly understand how Victoria felt about her colonial subjects is to examine what happened when the empire came to visit her (see Chapter 5). During these encounters, Victoria was regularly used to convey and legitimise decisions made by the government regarding imperial affairs. When the Bechuana chiefs Khama, Sebele, and Bathoen came to Britain in 1895 to appeal for imperial justice against the land-hungry Cecil Rhodes, Queen Victoria met with them at Windsor Castle. She addressed the chiefs, her words presumably approved in advance by Joseph Chamberlain, telling them that she was ‘glad to see [them], and to know that they love[d her] rule’ and confirming their settlement with Chamberlain, which reaffirmed imperial protection in their dispute with Rhodes.!”

For Victoria, these colonial encounters in the imperial metropole and those of her children and grandchildren in the empire infrequently registered in her letters and diaries. Above all, Victoria was a nation-imperial symbol, one that was used and remade by her subjects at home and in the empire. Despite her interest in colonial subjects, her concerns, and those of Albert, centred principally on salvaging what remained of the monarchy’s domestic prerogatives and raising their children and grandchildren to be useful to the British nation. Future monarchs, including her grandson George, would embrace imperial rituals and the royal tour, developed however reluctantly during the reign of Victoria, as principal functions of the British monarchy.

Victoria’s struggle to maintain control of royal travels and the projection of her image was part and parcel of a larger effort by both Victoria and Albert to recover the political prerogatives of the British monarchy. Victoria’s uncle, William IV, was the last British monarch to dismiss a prime minister (Viscount Melbourne in 1834). In The English Constitution (1867), Walter Bagehot unofficially demarcated the limits and rights of the constitutional monarchy inherited by Victoria — to be consulted, to advise, and to warn; he went as far as to suggest that the political transformations of the nineteenth century had allowed a ‘Republic [to] insinuate ... itself beneath the folds of the monarchy’.'* But, like so much of the British constitution, these were unwritten agreements, forged over centuries of political and cultural negotiation. To Victoria, they were suggestions at best. In one letter to her eldest daughter Victoria, she lamented what a ‘miserable thing [it was] to be a constitutional Queen’.

The true litmus test of this nineteenth-century constitutional settlement was whether or not politicians could willingly ignore or circumvent Victoria’s imagined prerogative. William Gladstone, about whom the Queen expressed the bitterest sentiments, rarely shared what he considered Victoria’s political meddling with his colleagues. Similarly, as we shall see, when Joseph Chamberlain wanted the Duke of York to go on a royal tour during the South African War, he circumvented the Queen’s objections by collaborating (or conspiring?) with the duke to persuade her. The fact that the Queen’s protests and attempted interventions rarely altered plans or policies is telling.

Both Gladstone, the grand old man of nineteenth-century liberalism, and Chamberlain, the former Birmingham radical turned imperialist, embraced and co-opted the monarchy as a national-imperial symbol compatible with their political worldviews, perhaps the clearest evidence of the monarchy’s extremely limited political prerogative by the fin de siécle. What the 1860s and early 1870s proved was that Queen Victoria could refuse her public services, but only at grave risk to the monarchy’s existence as an institution. The Great Queen became a symbol to be managed and manipulated, a process that Victoria unsuccessfully sought to limit and control. As the royal tours demonstrate, Victoria was a reluctant and often unwilling participant in the projection of her image — but she had little choice in the matter. Despite the failures of Victoria and Albert in this regard, both participated — willingly at times, unwillingly at others — in the reinvention of the British monarchy as a symbol of the nation-empire, a role that was accepted and embraced by her descendants.

The Prince Consort

The German-born Prince Albert (1819-61) proved himself to the British political establishment as a thoughtful and efficient political operator. Albert was, as Cannadine puts it, ‘fascinated by statecraft’ and ‘determined to play a full part in the political life of his adopted country’.*° He paid visits to politicians, was always present when Victoria met with her ministers, and drafted most of her letters. He quickly established himself as a patron of culture and the sciences and worked endlessly on his various projects. He was hardworking, tireless, and ruthlessly efficient. In the historical record, it is often extremely difficult to tell where Victoria ends and Albert begins. His influence as Victoria’s closest adviser and personal secretary over this period (1840-61) is undeniable. It was also comparatively short.

Albert was the cultural engineer of the Victorian monarchy and, in the context of this work, of an imperial culture centred on the monarchy.”! Long before Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech (1872) or the Royal Titles Act of 1876, Albert conceived of a new place for the monarchy in British society, namely a British imperial culture that was culturally anchored in the monarchy and monarchism. Albert’s personal involvement in the design of the Star of India, which itself became an essential part of royal visits to India, offers some insight to the role he played in imagining a new role for the monarchy:

The ‘Eastern star’ will perhaps on [the] whole be the best denomination. The Centre of the badge of the Order might then be the Queen’s image surmounted by a star & surrounded by an appropriate motto & the star of the Order might be the star surrounded by flames on a glory.... The Badge to be worn suspended from a Collar which might be composed of stars, Lions and Unicorns or the sunflower, or Lotus & ordinarily from a Ribbon. The presiding Idea would be contained in the Angel’s salutation ‘Glory to God, peace on earth & goodwill towards men’.”

While Victoria grew reluctant to participate in this new role after his premature death, his efforts unleashed irreversible changes to the way the monarchy did business. Most significantly, he had willingly and enthusiastically promoted the first royal tours of empire by his sons in 1860.

It was Albert who encouraged the Duke of Newcastle to accept the invitation from Canada and his wife to embrace George Grey’s proposal for a South African visit. It was Albert who worked through the arrangements and negotiations for the visits and imagined the ideological work that they would achieve. He wrote to his close friend Baron Stockmar: ‘What a cheering picture is here of the progress and expansion of the British race, and of the useful co-operation of the Royal Family in the civilisation which England has developed and advanced!’* In a toast given at Trinity House in June 1860, Albert remarked:

It will be a curious coincidence, that at the same time - a few weeks hence — though almost at the opposite poles, the Prince of Wales will inaugurate, in the Queen’s name, that stupendous work, the great bridge over the St. Lawrence in Canada, while Prince Alfred will lay the foundation stone of the breakwater for the harbour of Cape Town. What vast considerations, as regards our country, are brought to our minds in this simple fact! What present greatness! What past history! What future hopes! And hope important and beneficent is the part given to the Royal Family of England to act in the development of those distant and rising countries, who recognise in the British Crown, and their allegiance to it, their supreme bond of union with the mother country and each other!”

Albert’s careful planning of both of his sons’ tours indicates the importance of the visits to him. His public excitement and the laborious private negotiations over the royal tours reflect a concerted effort to reshape the monarchy and to create a new kind of imperial culture. While Albert may have been the ‘uncrowned King’ of the United Kingdom, Victoria was the reigning monarch and the official author of most correspondence on the subject of the royal visits. The obvious change in the Queen’s tone regarding the travels of her children and grandchildren after his death reflects both the loss of his voice and the profound personal and psychological trauma that she experienced over his death.

Through public patronage, national service, and royal ritual, Albert sought to connect the monarchy to notions of progress and improvement. He spent his years as a British royal nurturing an image of the monarchy as a patron of the arts and sciences, most famously in organising the Great Exhibition of 1851. To Albert, the monarchy needed to excise the demons of excess and decadence associated with the previous two reigns and make a new image for itself of a respectable and moral royal family, one that echoed the reign of George III. In this vein, he demanded that his children be useful — to commit to a difficult regimen of learning and improvement and to serve their nation in Her Majesty’s military forces.

Victoria and Albert raised their children to be useful, both to their family and to the nation. There was nothing particularly imperial about their or their children’s upbringing. Victoria and Albert considered the royal tradition of military service most important.” In an age before proconsular apprenticeship, service in Her Majesty’s armed services was the primary route through which royal sons could earn their spurs and see the world.” Their children Alfred (navy) and Arthur (army) served, as did their grandchildren Albert Victor and George (both in the navy).

For this reason, royal visits could not, he decided, invoke images of the royal progress of past times (with some exception for India]. Royal children were to visit the empire as respectable and upstanding subjects, who dressed in the respectable and simple clothing of modern royals, rather than the effete regalia of monarchy’s past. India was different, because colonial administrators identified the need to appeal to an ‘Oriental mind’ that yearned for medieval spectacle. But most of this was left for imperial durbars, where the viceroy rather than royal children represented the Queen in an official capacity.

Victoria and Albert had very specific ideas about how their children should behave and represent the monarchy while abroad. As we shall see, governments and colonial administrators were also deeply concerned with the dynamics of royal rituals in relation to the legitimacy of imperial hierarchy. Who would represent the sovereign and how she was represented were crucial questions for both the monarchy and for governing elites who ran the empire.

Thus, royal children were to appear in the empire as first subjects of the Queen rather than as her representatives. In 1875, for instance, the Queen and the Viceroy of India, Lord Northbrook, agreed that there could be no durbar when the Prince of Wales visited India.” When her sons and grandsons travelled as royal sailors, they were expected to perform their duties, much to the surprise of the Queen’s colonial subjects. Propriety demanded that only the governor of a colony, the Queen’s official proxy, could represent her, and this fact had to be reflected in imperial ceremonies. On certain occasions, tour planners made certain that the governor and the royal visitor were not seen together, so as to avoid any confusion in the minds of colonial peoples.” Seeking to avoid the perception of excess that characterised Continental monarchies and past British monarchs, Victoria and Albert sought to project the image of a respectable and modern royal family both as a means of raising dutiful and respectful children and protecting the monarchy from the fate of its Continental brethren.

While Victoria dictated that royal children could not represent her in an official capacity, this conceptual distinction was not easily maintained on the ground. When royal children arrived, they immediately became the centre of attention. Sometimes exceptions were granted for Princes of Wales to pass out medals or honours, but never without a debate about the precedents and consequences of doing so. In 1875, the Queen opposed the idea of the Prince of Wales rather than Lord Northbrook distributing the Star of India. During the investiture ceremony, as things turned out, Edward and Northbrook sat together, and Edward awarded the Star of India to the guests of honour under ‘special warrant from the Queen’.*!

This standard also made sense in the context of the royal tours as an educational experience. As didactic tools, the royal tours were imagined as grand tours of empire, not leisurely tourist expeditions. Victoria — and particularly Albert - wanted the monarchy to be useful. Before Alfred’s travels in 1860, Queen Victoria sent off countless letters to naval and colonial officials, explaining that her son was to receive no special treatment (once sailor reached land, this never happened, of course). For instance, Lord John Russell wrote to the Foreign Office regarding:

Her Majesty’s desire and intention that HRH should apply himself more particularly to his professional studies as an officer in HM Fleet, combining with those studies the acquirement of such knowledge of Foreign Countries as he may have opportunities of obtaining.... You will explain the nature and objects of HRH’s visits to the Ports of the Country, and, unless otherwise informed, you will state in the most respectful manner ... that His Royal Highness should decline formal civilities.”

While the protocols established by Victoria and Albert were focused on shaping their children’s attitudes, colonial subjects took note. It was said that the Xhosa chief Sandile - who was brought to Cape Town by Governor George Grey to be awed into obedience — was impressed most not by Cape Town or its works of progress but by the sight of Prince Alfred swabbing the deck. When the Prince of Wales returned from Canada in 1860, under the ‘delusion that the tumultuous welcome [he experienced] was for [him]’, Albert forcefully reminded him that ‘it was nothing of the kind. It was simply an expression of loyalty to the Queen.’ For royal sons serving in the military, the tours were as much about discipline and service as seeing the world. For the heirs to the throne, they were meant to give them public responsibilities and to see the empire over which they would one day rule.

Victoria and Albert took a particular interest in carefully selecting fellow travellers for their children and grandchildren. The Prince of Wales went to Canada, as Ian Radforth describes, with a group of middle-aged men and was prohibited from interacting with the younger midshipmen abroad the HMS Hero.** Albert made sure that General Robert Bruce, the Prince of Wales’ governor, was always ‘under the same roof’ with Edward while in North America so as to avoid any moral wandering on the prince’s part. There was a long conversation between the monarchy and Indian administrators over Alfred’s travelling companion for his 1870 visit to India. The Queen thought that the young prince was ‘rather easily led away’ and thus in need of a ‘steady, firm’ travelling companion who would ‘exercise a good influence’.** For the Queen, this was one of the few prerogatives that she could dictate during later tours.