Naturally there was trouble over the amount of money to be provided for the expedition as well as over its composition. Reynolds’s Newspaper, which attacked the whole ‘notion of Albert Edward, the hero of the Mordaunt divorce suit, the mighty hunter’, being interested in anything other than ‘pig-sticking and women’, protested that working-men were being robbed so that the Prince of Wales could enjoy himself. To loud cheers of support from a crowd of over 60,000 people in Hyde Park, Charles Bradlaugh said that the nation did not wish to prevent the brave, moral, intellectual future King of England’s going to India, ‘indeed they would speed him on a longer journey than that’. But they did object to having to pay for such a ridiculous jamboree. All over England similar hostile demonstrations were held. Outraged orators demanded to know why the country was being asked to pay for presents to Indian princes, while the gifts offered in return would become the Prince’s personal property. Banners and placards were waved in protest against the Indian visit, and during his travels that summer the Prince himself was made aware of the strong feelings which had once more been roused against him.
Even in royal circles people spoke slightingly of his mission. At Balmoral, after a Sunday morning service, Lady Errol, a Presbyterian attendant of the Queen, remarked to Henry Ponsonby how beautiful was the prayer which had been said for the Prince of Wales. ‘Well,’ Ponsonby replied. ‘I don’t know that it was a bad one, but I didn’t understand what he meant [by] “Oh bless abundantly the objects of his mission.” ’ Lady Errol replied, ‘Oh, all the good he may do.’ Ponsonby sharply observed, ‘The object of his mission is amusement.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Lord Salisbury.
‘And to kill tigers. Perhaps he meant to bless the tigers.’
In spite of all the criticism, however, and in face of strong objection from the Radicals and many members of the Liberal Party, Disraeli persuaded the House of Commons to approve the expenditure of £52,000 by the Admiralty for the transport of the Prince’s suite to and from India and of a further £60,500 by the Treasury for the Prince’s personal expenditure including presents to Indian rulers. An additional £100,000 was subsequently contributed by the Indian government. Yet the Prince, supported by Bartle Frere and The Times, maintained that this was far from enough: the Indian princes would present their guest with gifts far more lavish than any that he would be able to afford to give them in return. And, as if confident that the amount of his allowances would be increased when the importance of his mission was realized, he spoke carelessly to his ‘creatures’, so Disraeli recorded, ‘of spending, if requisite, a million, and all that’. But although ‘a thoroughly spoilt child’ who could not ‘bear being bored’, he was also, in Disraeli’s opinion, ‘the most amiable of mortals’; and he soon reconciled himself to the amount which the Prime Minister had raised for him without further protest — and, in the event, did not exceed it.
Irritated by quarrels over the number and quality of his companions, over the amount of money to be allowed him, and over his official status in India — where the position of the Viceroy, so the Queen insisted, must on no account be prejudiced — the Prince was also piqued by the attitude of his wife, who, refusing to accept her husband’s explanation that this was an all-male party and that ‘it was difficult for ladies to move about’ in India, continued to complain bitterly about being left behind and appeared to Disraeli as though she were preparing to commit suttee. Albert Grey, who had equipped himself with a derringer ‘to save H.R.H. from assassination’, reported her as being ‘very miserable’, not only because she badly wanted to see India and was hurt at being left behind but also ‘because besides the not unnatural fear about his health — in its best day but flabby — there [was] the more uncomfortable dread of the fanatic’s knife about the sharpness of which he has received many warning letters’. The Princess was also very upset because the Queen refused to allow her to take the children to Denmark while their father was in India. Although she later relented, the Queen insisted that a decision given by the judges in the reign of George II gave her the right to prevent the royal children from leaving the country. Taking pity on the Princess, Disraeli consulted the Solicitor-General, who gave it as his opinion that the precedent was a bad one, that the Queen ought not to exercise it even if it existed, and that ‘to force the Princess to live in seclusion … six months in England [was] a serious matter’.
Refused permission to visit either India or Denmark, the Princess, in Dean Stanley’s opinion, looked ‘inexpressibly sad’. And, as the time drew nearer for his departure, the Prince seemed quite as miserable himself, confessing to Lord Granville that he ‘left England with a heavy heart and was so depressed in spirits on reaching Calais’ that, although he was cheered on his departure by thousands of people willing to show that antagonism to his expensive venture was far from universal, he ‘felt seriously inclined to return home instead of going on’. He continued ‘tremendously low’ in Paris, wrote Lord Carrington, who had ‘never seen him like it before’; and even after their arrival in Brindisi, where crowds on the quay greeted the Duke of Sutherland with shouts of ‘l’amico di Garibaldi’, he had still not recovered his spirits. At Brindisi he went aboard H.M.S. Serapis, a specially converted troopship with large square portholes, which was waiting to take him through the Suez Canal by way of Athens. It was ‘comfortable but not smart’, and the Prince went to his cabin looking ‘decidedly gloomy’. In fact, the whole party, so Lord Carrington told his mother, were ‘more like a party of monks than anything else’. There were ‘no jokes or any approach to it’. Georgina Frere was given similar news by her father. No shipload of pilgrims ‘were ever better behaved’, Sir Bartle told her; so far there had been ‘nothing which would have been voted out of place at Windsor Castle’. Lord Charles Beresford, a jocular Irishman, attempted to keep up the party’s flagging spirits, but there were no games of whist, ‘no sprees, or bear fights or anything’. The day after leaving Brindisi the Serapis began to toss in the swelling sea, and ‘several chairs were empty at dinner,’ Albert Grey recorded. ‘H.R.H. was the first to go and a suspicious smell of eau de Cologne outside his cabin told the tale.’ On recovery he was persuaded by Beresford to go up on deck and join the others, who were being weighed. Apart from Beresford himself very few of them were less than eleven stone. The Prince turned the scales at fourteen stone twelve pounds — which made Grey wonder how he would stand up to the heat of India.
At Cairo the Prince seemed rather less dispirited. He went out of his way to call upon the widow of the former French Ambassador to London whom he had met and liked when he was a boy — a fat, old, deaf lady whose conversation ‘became rather tiring in the hot weather’. And, resplendent in his new uniform of field marshal (a rank to which the Queen had raised him on her last birthday), he invested the Khedive’s son with the Order of the Star of India with such ‘dignity of manner and grace’ that Albert Grey thought that ‘every Englishman, had he been there, would have been proud of him’.
By the time the Serapis had entered the Red Sea on her way down to Aden, the Prince’s gloom had been quite dispersed. ‘His temper is most amiable,’ Grey wrote home. ‘He sits mopping away as we steam along with the thermometer at 88 on the bridge at midnight, not complaining like the others of the discomfort of the heat — but congratulating himself as he throws away one wet handkerchief after another — “What a capital thing is a good wholesome sweat!” ’ He even found the energy to play deck tennis.