Royals on tour

Politics, pageantry and colonialism

Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery, Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526109378
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526109408
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Royals on Tour explores visits by European monarchs and princes to colonies, and by indigenous royals to Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s with case studies of travel by royals from Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. Such tours projected imperial dominion and asserted the status of non-European dynasties. The celebrity of royals, the increased facility of travel, and the interest of public and press made tours key encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans. The reception visitors received illustrate the dynamics of empire and international relations. Ceremonies, speeches and meetings formed part of the popular culture of empire and monarchy. Mixed in with pageantry and protocol were profound questions about the role of monarchs, imperial governance, relationships between metropolitan and overseas elites, and evolving expressions of nationalism.

CHAPTER ONE

Empire tours: royal travel between colonies and metropoles

Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery

Royals have always been a peripatetic species. In the Ancient world, Hadrian spent more than half of his reign travelling the Roman empire, from Britain to the Black Sea to Egypt. When monarchs still led their forces into battle, as did St Louis during the Crusades and as did other medieval and early modern kings, travel to battlefields abroad was necessarily part of the ‘job’. With great pageantry and festivity, ‘royal entries’ marked the arrival of sovereigns into the major cities of their own realms. Emperor Charles V travelled ceaselessly through his domains in the Iberian peninsula, Low Countries, Burgundy and central Europe. Queen Elizabeth I of England made royal ‘progresses’ from one town and estate to another, sometimes bankrupting her fortunate or unfortunate hosts. Tsar Peter the Great left imperial Russia, still an exotic, distant and, in Western eyes, near barbaric kingdom, for a ‘grand embassy’ that took him to Vienna, Amsterdam and London. Neither Charles nor Elizabeth, however, visited their possessions in the New World, nor did Peter make it to the far reaches of his continental empire.

Non-European royals travelled less extensively. Rulers of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam traditionally remained immured in their forbidden cities, though Mughal rulers on the Indian subcontinent and Moroccan sultans, like early modern European counterparts, regularly moved the court around their territories, and Ottoman and Persian rulers made visits to neighbouring states. However, Hindu sovereigns faced the loss of caste purity if they crossed the ‘black waters’, until maharajas breached that interdiction in the second half of the nineteenth century.

A few non-Western royals travelled to Europe in the early modern period. Franciscan missionaries escorted two princes from Ceylon to Portugal at the end of the 1500s; the ‘Black Prince’, Dom João, took the name of the Portuguese king when he was baptised, and he had a church constructed on the outskirts of Lisbon. A French cleric accompanied Prince Nguyen Phuc Canh, son of the ruler of Vietnam, to France in 1787. The youthful prince was received by King Louis XVI, had his portrait painted and was the darling of the Versailles court, although hopes for an alliance between the two kingdoms and conversion of the Vietnamese dynasty to Christianity came to nought. In between those two visits, numerous ‘princes’ landed in Europe, though in a period when knowledge of distant countries was vague, and titles were far from standardised and often contested, almost any traveller might be gratified with a royal title. Pocahontas, the daughter of a Native American chief – converted to Christianity and married to an Englishman – arrived in London in 1606, and was paraded around by the Virginia Company as a princess of the Powhatan empire. Subsequent ‘royal’ visitors to Europe included four ‘Indian Kings’ who visited England in 1700, a ‘Prince of Timor’ who travelled to the Netherlands, Britain and Canada at mid-century, and the Polynesian ‘princes’ Aoutourou and Omai who returned to Europe with Louis-Antoine Bougainville and James Cook.¹

In the nineteenth century, royals began to travel more frequently and more widely, thanks in part (as will be discussed) to innovations in transport. European monarchs met for ‘summits’ and called upon one another individually, as seen by the reciprocal visits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie. Recreation, affairs of state and family visits by royals married into foreign courts – notably, the progeny of Queen Victoria and of King Christian IX of Denmark, the ‘father-in-law of Europe’ – kept royals on the move.² By the fin de siècle, so many monarchs and their family members passed through France that the government had appointed a full-time official to look after visiting royals.³

The presence of non-Western royals in Europe also became somewhat more frequent, their number including some, such as the famous Sikh maharaja Duleep Singh, who had been dethroned by the British but allowed to settle in Britain.⁴ Among royal or ‘semi-royal’ visitors in the second half of the nineteenth century were the hereditary prime minister of Nepal, the shah of Persia, the Ottoman sultan, the sultan of Johore, the kings of Zululand, Hawai’i and Siam, and three rulers from Bechuanaland.⁵ For wealthy maharajas, visits to Europe were becoming as significant as the ‘Grand Tour’ of the European continent had been for the eighteenth-century British elite.⁶ In European capitals, spa towns and Mediterranean resorts, royals were far from uncommon, though they travelled and were accommodated in ways to which commoners were far from accustomed.

Writing the history of royal tours

Royal tours of the 1800s and early 1900s, and since, have created much documentation, perhaps the most obvious record contained in newspapers and magazines, newsreels and then radio and television broadcasts. Royals were (and are) celebrities, their every move shadowed by eager journalists. The press had a field day when royals came to visit, writers and readers fascinated with banquets, ribbon-cuttings and speeches, the clothing and jewellery sported by royals and tittle-tattle about their less public activities. Royal tours have also produced more official accounts by court chroniclers, often published in illustrated commemorative albums. First-person accounts range from diaries written by royals themselves – though these are sometimes closely safeguarded within royal archives, or have been lost – and by those who accompanied or came into contact with them.

Images constitute particularly important documentation. Image, after all, was a key ingredient in the popularity (or lack of it) of royal personages, with tours carefully arranged for maximum exposure of the visitors. The invention of photography, and development of cameras that could be used by amateurs – royals and others – made possible posed, official and informal shots. These provide not just portraits of individuals, but portrayals of the panoply of celebrations and decorations. How various groups are depicted, from royal parties to ‘natives’ and commoners, gives insight into social hierarchies and inter-communal relations, and to the changing ways in which tours were staged and received. They occasionally also give evidence of opposition to the royal presence.

The material culture of visits provides further sources. Tours generally involved gift exchange, from precious presentation objects offered to royals to ethnographic ‘curios’ (in the language of the colonial age), many of these artefacts are now housed in museums and royal collections. There are, as well, elaborately crafted proclamations, medals and awards, and more quotidian items, including in recent times the huge array of souvenirs that help market the monarchy.⁷ Left behind in the places visited are buildings the royals opened, statues they unveiled, plaques erected in their honour, and various other public and private ‘relics’.

Libraries, museums and private collections, and even landscapes, thus abound with evidence of royal tours. Archival documents provide details on their organisation and execution, budgets, transport, protocol, timetables, banquets and ceremonies, programmes for gala performances, and the often large cast of characters who accompanied royal visitors or who were involved in the caravans, as well as information on luggage, conveyances and travel requisites. Given the wealth of documents it is somewhat surprising that royal tours have until recently commanded relatively little scholarly attention, though the theme is now being addressed in various genres, including new books directed to general readers, among which royalty is a popular subject.⁸ They also include full-scale volumes on tours of particular countries, representative among them Jane Connors’s study of royal tours of Australia.⁹ Tours to Canada, South Africa and other parts of the British empire have also been investigated by scholars such as Phillip A. Buckner, who argue that these visits played an important role in consolidating national as well as imperial identities.¹⁰

The literature encompasses studies that specifically situate visits in the context of the history and evolution of ‘modern monarchy’, international relations and cross-cultural encounters. A pioneering volume published by Johannes Paulmann in 2000 underlined the importance of face-to-face royal encounters in the nineteenth century, when crowned heads reigned in most European countries (and thought of themselves as a majestic ‘internationale’ bound by heredity, status and intermarriage). Paulmann demonstrated how royal encounters sent strong political signals and provoked diverse responses. He introduced perspectives on ‘symbolic politics’, and the way that visits represented a ‘staging’ or ‘performance’ of monarchies seeking legitimation in the face of growing democratisation, parliamentarianism and challenges to the established order. For the public, the visits were, he added, at the very least ‘international variety shows’, even when there existed underlying ambivalence about the institution of monarchy itself.¹¹ Paulmann’s work has inspired much further research, especially in the field of cultural history, on the monarchs in Germany – thirty-three kings, princes and other royals reigned until their dynasties were all disestablished after 1918, leaving historians a plethora of case studies to investigate.¹²

Not surprisingly the British monarchy has attracted much attention, not least in the countless biographies of royals. Scholars who have contributed to the emergence of a ‘new royal history’, such as David Cannadine,¹³ have reflected on the constitutional role of royalty, as well as its spectacle, in the ‘invention of tradition’ and the ‘ornamentalist’ connections between Britain and its empire. Several works have made royal tours a particular focus. Matthew Glencross’s book on the state visits of Edward VII discusses the diplomatic significance of that monarch’s travels within Europe.¹⁴ Charles V. Reed’s monograph on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British royal tours of empire demonstrates the importance of travel in the performance of both monarchy and imperial identity. Miles Taylor’s ongoing research points to the intimate links between Queen Victoria and India, where she sent several of her sons and grandsons on tour.¹⁵ Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent’s edited collection makes clear the importance of Victoria – occasionally incarnated by a touring prince – for Indigenous people such as Aboriginal people in Australia and Maori in New Zealand.¹⁶ For the twentieth century, Philip Murphy’s work on the British monarchy and empire has offered a detailed analysis of relations between the crown and colonies in the era of decolonisation, by which time royals were frequent travellers. Murphy has shown how members of the royal family (though never the Queen) were solicited and despatched to independence ceremonies around the empire, concluding with the presence of the Prince of Wales at the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.¹⁷ Ian Radforth’s study of an earlier Prince of Wales in Canada and the United States in 1860, and volumes edited by Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens on monarchs’ heirs, show how succeeding Princes of Wales, and other sons of monarchs – often more frequent travellers than their reigning parents –were sent on ‘missions’ abroad. Their travels exemplified a brand of personal politics and imperial ‘soft diplomacy’ increasingly important (not least because of media coverage) from the late 1800s.¹⁸ These works testify to the broad contexts and wide-ranging implications of tours, and their value for an understanding of the dynamics of domestic, international and colonial affairs.

The ‘new imperial history’, and trends in historical writing that have contributed to a renewal of studies of colonialism, make possible fresh outlooks on monarchy. Royal tourists were prime exemplars of particular races, classes and genders, illustrating three central themes in the new historiography. Contemporary approaches have emphasised that colonising and colonised countries must be considered in the same analytical field, and that links between various colonies are often as significant as those between colonies and metropoles. Tours by roving royals, often visiting multiple colonial sites during the course of their journeys, were manifest ways in which ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, mother-country and overseas possessions, occupy connected terrains. Many strategies taken from literary analysis, cultural studies, postmodernism and postcolonialism have been enveloped in the new colonial history. These have encouraged scholars to ‘read’ various sorts of texts, from printed materials to images, and to examine the reception of these texts, and royal tours provide a panorama of words and pictures. They have also pointed out the ways in which individuals and groups ‘perform’ the roles assigned to them or the ones they create for themselves, and a royal tour was, in a very real sense, a performance for both visitors and hosts. Discussion of transnational linkages and cultural hybridities extends to overseas journeys, where festivities surrounding royals included both European traditions and ones – e.g., ceremonies of greeting, song, dance, art and artisanry – from local societies. In short, general trends in historiography over the past several decades beneficially influence the way royal tours can now be studied (as the chapters in this volume testify), and research on such journeys also contributes original perspectives to the new imperial history.

European royals in the colonies

Our earlier edited volume on Crowns and Colonies identified many constitutional, personal and cultural ties between monarchies, states and subjects in colonial situations.¹⁹ The present volume takes up the theme of royal tours, which figured in several chapters of that collection. Royal tours became, from the late 1800s, a primary strategy though which imperial paramountcy was projected in the colonies, feudatory obeisance to imperial authority was reflected, and mutual recognition between rulers of European nations and still independent overseas states was symbolised. The theme extends far beyond the British empire, and the cases contained here explore travels by continental European and British royals, and by Indigenous monarchs and their representatives as well. Comings and goings undertaken by sovereigns, their kin and their deputies moving between imperial centres and peripheries, and between Europe and Asia or Africa, offer a significant lens though which to view modern monarchy, cultural exchange, international relations, imperialism and decolonisation.

Visits by royals to the overseas possessions of their own and other countries, by vassal monarchs from protectorates to imperial metropoles, and by royals from countries hoping to stave off colonial takeover, we argue, were a vital, and largely new, aspect of high imperialism from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Tours expressed and promoted royal and imperial authority, though in some instances they revealed resistance against expansionist designs. They affirmed the legitimacy, status and privileges of dynasties, even those whose thrones had come under an onslaught by conquering armies and navies bent on annexing territory, proclaiming protectorates or ‘o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One  Empire tours: royal travel between colonies and metropoles
• Chapter Two  Royal tour by proxy: the embassy of Sultan Alauddin of Aceh to the Netherlands, 1601–1603
• Chapter Three  French imperial tours: Napoléon III and Eugénie in Algeria and beyond
• Chapter Four  Something borrowed, something blue: Prince Alfred’s precedent in overseas British royal tours, c. 1860–1925
• Chapter Five  Royalty, loyalism and citizenship in the nineteenth-century British settler empire
• Chapter Six  The Maharaja of Gondal in Europe in 1883
• Chapter Seven  Performing monarchy: the Kaiser and Kaiserin’s voyage to the Levant, 1898
• Chapter Eight  Colonial kings in the metropole: the visits to France of King Sisowath (1906) and Emperor Khai Dinh (1922)
• Chapter Nine  Tensions of empire and monarchy: the African tour of the Portuguese crown prince in 1907
• Chapter Ten  Belgian royals on tour in the Congo, 1909–1960
• Chapter Eleven  Royal symbolism: Crown Prince Hirohito’s tour to Europe in 1921
• Chapter Twelve  The throne behind the power?: Royal tours of ‘Africa Italiana’ under fascism
• Chapter Thirteen  Strained encounters: royal Indonesian visits to the Dutch court in the early twentieth century
• Chapter Fourteen  The 1947 royal tour in Smuts’s Raj: South African Indian responses
• Index