Majesty in Canada

Essays on the Role of Royalty

Colin Coates

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781459712485
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession to the throne, the Centre of Canadian Studies of the University of Edinburgh hosted its annual conference on the theme "Majesty in Canada". The essays that were presented at that conference reflect the wide-ranging recognitions of the different roles that monarchs and their representatives have played in Canada.

The essays examine how Canadians have understood their ties to royalty and how the regal principle formed an important part of the national identity. Royal tours, vice-regal initiatives, representations of the sovereign's power, and Canadian appeals to monarchical sentiments comprise the themes of these engaging essays, providing an up-to-date look at the historical and current personal influence of the Crown in Canada.

Tours

The Invention of Tradition?:

The Royal Tours of 1860 and 1901 to Canada

PHILLIP BUCKNER

On July 23, 1860, the future Edward VII, then Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the throne of Great Britain, arrived at St. John’s, Newfoundland, to begin a fifty-eight-day tour across British North America. Just over forty years later his son, the heir apparent and future George V, then Duke of Cornwall and York, arrived at Quebec City on September 16, 1901, to begin a thirty-five-day royal progress that would involve crossing Canada twice. To contemporaries the importance of these tours was self-evident. In 1901, as the Toronto Telegram reported, the streets were “aglow with happy boys and girls, who will ever remember the visit of the Duke of Cornwall, as their parents remember the visit of his father to Toronto 41 years ago.”¹ Both tours were important media events, exhaustively covered by the Canadian and British press and the subject of several instant books. Indeed, for two generations of Canadians these tours were among the most important public events to take place in their lifetimes. Yet one looks in vain for even a brief mention of either tour in most modern studies of Canada.² In part this lack of interest reflects the increasing irrelevancy of the monarchy to most present-day Canadians. But it also reflects the obsession of Canadian historians with the evolution of a Canadian national identity. Particularly since the 1950s Canadian historians have been concerned with documenting the transition of Canada from colony to nation and the creation by Canadians of a set of national symbols distinct from those of the United Kingdom. Since the popularity until comparatively recently of the British royal family and of royal symbolism among Canadians would seem to raise questions about the validity of this approach, Canadian historians have preferred to ignore the existence of popular royalism in Canada.³ Even those who have taken the subject seriously have tended to explain away Canadian enthusiasm as a misguided legacy of empire. For example, the subtitle of Robert Stamp’s Kings, Queens & Canadians: A Celebration of Canada’s Infatuation with the British Royal Family tells it all.⁴ Support for the monarchy was obviously an infatuation. Since the monarchy was clearly an alien—British—institution, its popularity must have been a product of indoctrination by the imperial authorities and their servile Canadian counterparts, a classic example of what Marxist historians would call the creation of a “false consciousness.”

Ironically, in their attitude to the monarchy Canadian historians were more or less following (albeit unintentionally) British historians. Until recently, despite a host of mostly uncritical biographies of Victoria, there were few serious studies of the nineteenth-century monarchy. That began to change with the publication of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, which included David Cannadine’s “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, 1820–1977.”⁵ Cannadine’s article has been followed by a growing volume of publications that attempt to explain the popularity of Queen Victoria and her successors as well as the role played by royal pageantry and rituals.⁶ It now seems clear that Cannadine downplayed the historical roots of the pageantry that surrounds the royal family and of the royal traditions that were invented, or perhaps one should say re-invented or renovated, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also placed too much emphasis on the latter years of Victoria’s reign, since the focus of the modern monarchy on providing crowd-pleasing spectacles seems to have begun in the 1840s, if not even earlier. Yet the essence of his argument, that the role of the Crown was re-invented in the nineteenth century as the British monarchy was transformed into an imperial monarchy, is unassailable. As Cannadine points out in his recent study Ornamentalism: How The British Saw Their Empire, there “had been local recognition of coronations, weddings, jubilees and funerals for as long as there had been a monarchy, and at the time of the Napoleonic Wars these festivities had been successfully extended to colonies.” What was new was that in the late nineteenth century these ceremonies “were propelled on to a much higher plane of efficiency, self-consciousness and ostentation, and as the empire expanded, they were taken and carried along with it.”⁷

Cannadine is less successful in explaining why royal ceremonialism was transformed in the late nineteenth century and why it was so successfully extended to the colonies of British settlement overseas. For all of its strengths the “invention of tradition” approach can be misleading, particularly in the hands of less sophisticated scholars than Cannadine.⁸ Provenance of an historical tradition is always difficult to establish with precision, but even if one can show that a particular tradition was manufactured at a particular time by identifiable people for a particular purpose, provenance “does not explain the imaginative appeal of a symbol nor its subsequent mutations over time.”⁹ Moreover, it is easy to fall into the assumption that the public makes no contribution to the evolution of successful traditions and can be manipulated, more or less at will, by the governing elites. One arrives at this conclusion teleologically by studying the traditions that are successfully “invented” while ignoring those efforts at the conscious invention of tradition that fail. In fact, the “invention of tradition” approach cannot really answer the question of why certain traditions can be successfully invented (or reinvented) and not others. Certainly it cannot adequately explain the depth of popular support for an institution like the British monarchy. Indeed, the key agency that led the monarchy to expand its ceremonial performances so dramatically in the 1840s and to reach out for greater popular support was neither the royal family nor their advisers, who were drawn from the highest echelons of the aristocracy, but “ ‘pressure from without’ that came from much lower in the social hierarchy.”¹⁰ As Jane Connors has argued, it is time to move beyond the notion that popular royalism can be explained “in terms of conscious manipulation from on high and an audience of ‘cultural dopes’ down below.”¹¹

This is not to deny that there was an attempt at conscious manipulation. But in the case of a complex cultural event like a royal tour there are usually a variety of agendas—frequently conflicting agendas—at work. Ironically, both the 1860 and the 1901 royal tours to Canada took place despite the lack of enthusiasm of the monarch. The 1860 tour—the first official royal tour to Canada and the first visit by an heir to the throne—was the belated fulfillment of a promise by Victoria to reward the Canadians for raising a regiment for service in the Crimea. In 1859 the Parliament of the United Province of Canada pressed for a royal visit to dedicate the recently completed railway bridge across the St. Lawrence in Montreal and to open the new Parliament buildings in Ottawa. Although Canadian royalists would later claim that the tour was “the product of the Queen’s own heart and mind,”¹² Queen Victoria had no intention of going herself and initially was cool to the idea of sending the Prince of Wales. Only under the combined pressure of Prince Albert, who foresaw an enlarged role for the monarchy as the lynchpin of the Empire, and of her constitutional advisers in Britain, especially the 5th Earl of Newcastle, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, did Victoria finally consent to send the eighteen-year-old Edward to represent her.¹³

By 1901 the pattern of sending younger royals to visit different parts of the Empire was well established. Once again it was claimed that Victoria “devised and designed” the lengthy 1901 tour,¹⁴ but although the British government had proposed as early as 1898 that the Duke of Cornwall should make an extended tour of the colonies of settlement Victoria was unenthusiastic about sending her grandson (and heir) on a lengthy tour across the globe. After the passage of the bill federating the Australian colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, strongly urged that the Duke should open the first Australian Parliament.¹⁵ Victoria reluctantly consented but sought to confine the tour to Australia. Chamberlain, however, was determined to send a signal of gratitude to the other self-governing colonies for agreeing to send troops to participate in the South African War and at the last moment—over the Queen’s objections—Canada and South Africa were tacked on to the tour. Queen Victoria’s death early in 1901 brought these arrangements to an abrupt halt. Ironically Edward VII, despite fond memories of his own tour—one of the few times in his life when he had won the approval of his demanding parents—was extremely reluctant to send his only remaining son, George, on a lengthy overseas tour, and he had to be coerced into agreeing by Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour (soon to succeed his uncle as prime minister), two of the staunchest imperialists in the British Cabinet.¹⁶

In retrospect both the 1860 and the 1901 tours came to be portrayed as part of a conscious effort by successive monarchs to prepare a future king for his imperial responsibilities. How successfully the tours achieved this objective is questionable, since they were structured so that the royal visitors inevitably returned with a somewhat rosy and distorted vision of the colonies and an inflated sense of their own knowledge about local conditions. But the tours did encourage greater interest on the part of the future monarch in his overseas subjects. After 1860 the Prince of Wales lent his name to various imperial organizations in Britain and Canada, and as Edward VII he was fond of referring to his interest in his distant subjects. George V returned committed to persuading the British public of the value of the colonies, and he was frequently praised for having “in a unique degree personal knowledge of all parts of his dominions.”¹⁷ He encouraged trips to the colonies by his sons, a practice continued by George VI when he became king and by George VI’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, who has made numerous trips to Commonwealth countries and whose commitment to the Commonwealth is indisputable.¹⁸

Nonetheless, the key force in persuading first Victoria and then Edward to allow the heir apparent to undertake long and arduous colonial tours was undoubtedly the British government. In both cases the tours to Canada were to reward Canadians for contributing to an imperial war and to reinforce colonial loyalty to the Empire, and in both cases the tours became important media events not only in the colonies but also in Britain. In 1860 and in 1901 elaborate ceremonies were held both at the commencement of the tours, with a royal progress to the point of departure and a display of British naval might, and at their conclusion, when the heir was welcomed home. In 1860 the Prince was accompanied by a number of prominent British journalists (as well as by American and Canadian journalists), several of whom published accounts of the tour. Edward, in fact, proved quite successful at mixing with fashionable journalists, and during his visits to Egypt in 1869 and India in 1875 he took along William Howard Russell, a correspondent of the London Times, as his “historian” and an artist, Sydney Hall of the Graphic, to supply the press with illustrative material.¹⁹ By 1901 the royal party...