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.
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’.