Royal Tours
BY ROGER FULFORD THE contrast between the start of Princess Margaret's Caribbean tour and that of her grandfather in 1901 will hang vividly in the mind of some older readers. King George and Queen Mary, as Duke and Duchess of York, em- barked on the Ophir, which had been painted a dazzling white, on a grey day in 1901, and there was a banquet on board, and the Duke has recorded how he nearly broke down in replying to the toast of his health which had been proposed by his father. Indeed, the story could be carried back for almost a century to ,the lime when King Edward VII, as a youth in his teens, set out for Canada and wrote to his mother and father from sea :"We have 1.,ten going under sail for the greater part of the day, as the wind is a fair one and we are anxious to save coal.'
But 'before that year, which was 1859, the researcher will look in vain for any comparable tours by members of the Royal Family. Admittedly both Queen Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent, and William IV spent some time in the British territories overseas, but this was merely incidental to their professional careers, and it is, for example, the explanation why William IV was able to give away the bride at Nelson's wedding at Nevis in 1787. But the, visits of these princes had no imperial significance. Broadly speaking, before the middle of the nineteenth century there was always a curiously static quality about the most prominent of English sovereigns— what The Times once rather angrily called 'the tradition of immobility of English Royalty.' A good example of this was provided by George III, who, in the course of a very long life, 4 never left England, and indeed his existence was virtually confined to the space enclosed by a line drawn from London to Cheltenham, and from Cheltenham to Plymouth. Perhaps the most venturesome' of that Sovereign's journeyings was when he appeared early one morning on the bridge at Chelten- ham and startled some workmen by calling for three cheers for the bridge. While we often read of Queen Elizabeth the First's 'progresses,' they were very much confined to the southern half of the country, and like the nightingale, which does not sing north of the Trent, the Virgin Queen adorned no bed north of that broad river. She once penetrated as far as Bristol, and immediately offered up thanks to Almighty God for having preserved her through such a long and hazardous journey. Perhaps the firSt glimmering of the idea that territories, however distant, like to see their sovereign can be traced to that surprisingly clever King, George IV. Possibly conscious that his father had lived too much mewed- up in Southern England, he devoted the first summers of his reign to visiting Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Hanover; the impromptu speech made by the King on landing in Ireland. which owed nothing to the over-cautious eyes of private secre- taries, must be accounted a masterpiece of royal oratory. But these excursions were mere child's play compared with those which were to develop with the nineteenth century.
The first of these was the one made in 1859 by King 1,dward VII as Prince of Wales, to which some reference has already been made. The Canadians, with a love for the British Isles which has ever characterised that nation, had equipped a regiment to fight against the Russians in the Crimean War. Queen Victoria was so touched by this act of devotion that she agreed that the Prince of Wales should go to Canada as soon as he was old enough, Although the Prince was accom- panied by some greybeards—the Colonial Secretary was of the party—the whole tour must be accounted a magnificent per- formance on the part of a boy of eighteen. He went on to visit the President of the United States, and the Americans soon afterwards tried to tempt Queen Victoria across the Atlantic on the grounds that her reception would be 'unparalleled.' The Prince Consort, in a public speech, drew attention to 'the vast considerations' which came to his mind on contemplating the Queen's son opening the bridge over the St. Lawrence. 'What present Greatness! What past History! What future Hopes! And how important and beneficent is the part given to the Royal Family of England in the development of these distant countries who recognise in the British Crown their supreme bond of union.' Trite enough words, maybe, in 1955, but spoken at a time when the Foreign Secretary could say, 'The tours of these great personages'seldom have more than a transient effect,' and when prominent men referred to the Colonies as 'millstones round our neck,' they were brave and prescient.
The point which the Prince Consort then made was a good one—and he developed it still further in a private letter when he wrote of the Royal Family co-operating in the spread of British civilisation—because the ties of near-relationship, trade and defence on which the Empire was originally formed were, in the Marxian sense of the word, perishing; so that, apart from habit and sentiment, the Crown was becoming the only surviving link between this country and its possessions overseas. This rather subtle link has always proved incompre- hensible to European statesmen, and Bismarck once amused the Empress Frederick by dogmatically asserting that the Prince of Wales had only gone to India in order to counteract Russian influence there. The years between 1859 and the present day have only emphasised the truth of the Prince Con- sort's words, and have, in fact, imposed a new and prodigious burden on the English Royal Family. King George V, who had all the seaman's passion for precise kriowledge, wrote in his diary after his visit to Australia in 1901 that he had steamed 45,000 miles by sea and 12,000 by rail, that the Ophir had burned 14,500 tons of coal, and that he had shaken 24,855 hands. His eldest son had perhaps the severest test of all in the great series of imperial visits planned • for him by the Home Government immediately after the First World War. (Lloyd George himself attached the greatest importance to these tours, and his last action as Prime Minister was to welcome the Prince back from India, which the curious may remember as one of the few occasions when Lloyd George used a classical tag—and it was possibly to prove more prophetic than he supposed—Morituri to salutamus.) Between 1919 and 1925 the Prince of Wales visited every one of the great Dominions, an4 he confessed at the end of it all that he felt not unlike a man who had been caught in a revolving door. The rather un, demonstrative attachment of the average Englishman to the Royal House was given a decidedly violent and unconventional twist in the Commonwealth. On one occasion in Canada the Prince of Wales was swept off his horse and handed 'like a football' over the heads of the crowd to the platform from which he was expected to make a speech with as much dignity as he could muster. There was a real danger that these im- perial progresses might lose their decorum and degenerate into exercises in mobbing.
In retrospect the details of all these travels become almost pathetically wearisome—rather like turning the leaves of some long-dead Edwardian's Kodak album of foreign 'snaps.' In some cases the company of valets and equerries was enlivened by the addition of a 'historian,' but the resulting volume was scarcely a book which a man of discrimination would wish to read. But if the details have grown monotonous, the general impression remains bright and vivid. A respected and popular, though not always judicious, Labour extremist once described one of these tours in the fashionable language of the 1920s as 'a joy ride.' No one who has had the courage to pick his way through the details of these imperial pil- grimages will feel that that is the mot juste, for it is not without significance that they have invariably been carried out by members of the family while they are still young. Although these tours have a history of barely a hundred years, they have lately gained in lustre through being bravely carried through by a young Queen an4 a young Princess, and they seem likely to increase both in frequency and importance, for, as Mr. Balfour once expressed it, 'they touch the deepest interests of the Monarchy.'
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