Majesty in Canada: Essays on the Role of Royalty

By Colin Coates

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Feb 4, 2006
• ISBN: 9781459712485

Colin Coates

Colin Coates was the host of the 2002 conference on "Majesty in Canada." He is the author and editor of various books, including the award-winning Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Vercheres and Laura Secord (with Cecilia Morgan). He is currently Canada Research Chair in Canadian Cultural Landscapes at Glendon College, York University, Toronto.

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Introduction: Majesty in Canada

COLIN M. COATES

In the twenty-first century, Canada’s connection to the British monarchy attracts both fervent support and stiff opposition. Whatever the attitudes to the British royal family at the present, in the Canadian past, the monarchy played a significant—often a central—cultural and political role. In May 2002, the Centre of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh held its annual conference on the theme of the role of monarchy in Canadian history and culture. The fiftieth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne provided the occasion for an exploration of the many contributions of monarchic principles to Canada. Delegates from the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and New Zealand examined many aspects of the issues.¹

Given its geographical distance from the throne, Canada’s connection to royalty was often experienced through the personal representatives of the monarch. Governors General wielded significant political, financial, and cultural power into the twentieth century, and in various ways they attempted to ensure Canadians’ allegiance to the throne. Royal and vice-regal tours assumed a large civic importance, providing a link of loyalty that tied together the disparate and regionalized country. On numerous occasions, many Canadians rushed to proclaim their fealty to the monarch, even if these expressions often served very different purposes. In contrast, republicanism remained a relatively minor theme in Canadian politics.² In 2002, then Minister of External Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister John Manley openly articulated his beliefs about abolishing Canada’s ties to the monarchy,³ but such perspectives have never had the degree of support here that they do in Australia.

Given their distance from their monarchs, British or French, local authorities explored ways to proclaim their ties to the throne; through naming practices and public ceremonies, reverence to the monarchs was inscribed onto Canadian maps and celebrated in the chief public events. Images of the monarch and art produced in honour of the monarch found their places in public edifices. But not all attempts to inculcate British values were successful. The British honours systems did not find a full place in Canada. Nonetheless, well into the twentieth century, the monarchical system provided the intellectual, literary, and cultural framework within which Canadians lived.

The monarchy held many diverse meanings for Canadians: ties to a homeland, a focus for political protest, or a celebration of difference from the United States. The relevance of the British monarchy today is questioned by many in Canada, as is true even in the United Kingdom. In April 2003, then premier of Quebec Bernard Landry added to the traditional pledge of allegiance to Her Majesty, for the duration of the present constitutional order, which will hopefully change one day in a democratic fashion.⁴ Nonetheless, the historical importance of monarchical principles is beyond doubt.

The year 2002 was not the first time that the University of Edinburgh has cast its eye on the Canadian monarchy. In the early twentieth century, the distinguished imperial constitutional expert and professor of Sanskrit Arthur Berriedale Keith wrote a number of books on dominion constitutional affairs and maintained a correspondence with Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. In his book The King and the Imperial Crown, Keith examined the role of the British monarch in tying together a disparate and evolving Commonwealth: the most important and vital link of Empire is the person of the king and the Crown.⁵ Keith was no apologist for the Crown. He decried, for instance, King Edward VII’s refusal to attend the 1908 tercentenary celebrations in Quebec City: Strange that he should have thrown away such an opportunity of attaching Canada to his throne and person.⁶ For Keith, the future of the Commonwealth depended on the British monarch’s willingness to project himself or herself abroad.

One of the key purposes of the 2002 conference was to pursue the example set by Keith by providing a critical evaluation of the role of the monarchy in Canadian history. This began through the recognition of the various crowns that have shaped Canadian history. Of course, the majority of papers dealt with the British monarchy, but the impact of the French kings during the time of New France was also considered. In many ways, New France was originally more perfectly monarchical than would be the case after the British Conquest.

In addition to the French and British monarchies, it is worth mentioning the other monarchies with a direct connection to Canada. The brief interest of the Scottish Crown in Canada, in its early attempt to colonize Nova Scotia, was evoked in the conference. In the 1620s, King James VI (James I of England) wished to establish a separate Scottish colony in North America, relying on Sir William Alexander. The under-capitalized venture experienced many difficulties. Alexander’s effort failed, but the geographical name persisted.⁷

Canada also served as a refuge for people of royal background. The intriguing story of Marie Louise de Bourbon living in the county of Arthabaska in Quebec emerges from the archives. After her death, rumours circulated that she was Louis XV’s granddaughter, who had escaped to North America from France.⁸ Likewise, a young May Bill, possibly the daughter of Edward VII, was raised in the small British Columbia town of Nakusp on the Arrow Lakes, escaping the ignominy of her illegitimate birth in England.⁹ More concretely, during the Second World War, the royal family of the Netherlands found exile in Ottawa, where Princess Juliana gave birth to her daughter. For the purposes of continuity, the hospital room was designated Dutch territory.

Moreover, the concept of Aboriginal monarchy in the Canadian context is worth consideration. While, as Peter Cook’s research shows, French explorers in the sixteenth century were quick to designate the Aboriginal leaders with monarchical titles, this practice largely disappeared by the seventeenth century, and recognition of Aboriginal leaders took the form of chiefs and sachems.¹⁰ Nonetheless, some later portraits imposed a degree of majesty on the Aboriginal leaders, for instance, John Verelst’s portraits of the Iroquois kings who were presented to Queen Anne in 1710. Certainly, many Aboriginal peoples continue to claim a direct connection to the British Crown and use this contention to bolster their political aims.

Majesty in Canada is a multi-faceted prism through which to understand the country’s development. In many ways, the theme presents an enigma. As evidence, two poems used in teaching the popular first-year course in Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2001–2002 can be cited. The first is by the late Carol Shields, 2001 Standard Life Lecturer in Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. In her poem, Coming to Canada—Age Twenty-two, Shields wrote:

Aunt Violet’s Canadian honeymoon

1932 It was swell and she

always meant to go back

but her life got in the way

It was cool and quiet there

with a king and queen

and people drinking tea

and being polite and clean . . .¹¹

In contrast, Robert Kroetsch, another Winnipeg poet and a keynote speaker at the 2000 British Association for Canadian Studies conference hosted by the Centre of Canadian Studies, wrote in The Seed Catalogue:¹²

How do you grow a past /

to live in

the absence of silkworms

the absence of clay and wattles (whatever the hell

they are)

the absence of Lord Nelson

the absence of kings and queens . . .

Depending on one’s poet, majesty in Canada is there but not there; Canada has had monarchs, but they didn’t belong to it. Nonetheless, the monarchy retained an ineffable presence, impressing tourists and Canadians—on occasion—and providing a link to a British homeland, at least for some. The theme of majesty in Canada offers insights into issues concerning symbolism and identity; it also reveals much about the nature of power in a North American colonial context.

The Canadian experience of monarchy, by the very nature of the different history of Canada, provides new insights into how to interpret the development of the country. The paradoxes of the Canadian experience of monarchy are explored in the pages of this book. From vice-regal ceremonies to enthusiastic crowds welcoming visiting royal figures, Canadians have celebrated their ties to the French and the British crowns. But they have done so in ways reflecting Canada’s own political and cultural development, and with a range of disparate goals. In that sense, majesty was not merely imported, but was also a form of local knowledge.

NOTES

1 The University of Edinburgh Centre of Canadian Studies receives funding from the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United Kingdom, Standard Life, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and External Trade. These funds permit the centre to host its annual conference. I would like to acknowledge the dedication of Grace Owens, former administrator of the centre, who flawlessly organized this and many other annual conferences. In 2002, the Centre of Canadian Studies was fortunate also to have the assistance of Anna Walsh, intern from the International Council for Canadian Studies. I am grateful to Andrea Waters’ careful copyediting and to Carey Pallister of the City of Victoria Archives for last-minute assistance with illustrations.

2 Wade A. Henry, Republicanism and British Identity in English Canada, 1864–1917 in Colin M. Coates, ed., Imperial Canada, 1867–1917 (Edinburgh: Centre of Canadian Studies, 1997), 177–86.

3 Erin Anderssen, Manley dismisses monarchy as Queen begins 12-day trip, The Globe and Mail (5 October 2002).

4 http://www.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/print.cgi?/2003/04/24/landry_oath030424

5 A. Berriedale Keith, The King and the Imperial Crown: The Power and Duties of His Majesty (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 452.

6 Ibid., 413.

7 John G. Reid, Sir William Alexander and North American Colonization: A Reappraisal (Edinburgh: Centre of Canadian Studies, 1990).

8 Archives du Séminaire de Québec, S.M.E. 2.1/Q/069.

9 Stuart McLean, Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada (Toronto: Viking, 1992), 334–44.

10 Peter Cook, presentation at the University of Toronto, March 2004.

11 Carol Shields, Coming to Canada—Age Twenty-two in Coming to Canada (Montreal: Carleton University Press, 1992), 27.

12 Robert Kroetsch, The Seed Catalogue (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1977).

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 had swelled to include three artists (including Hall) and a press agent, Donald Mackenzie Wallace (another foreign correspondent and future editor of the London Times), who produced an authorized account of the tour on his return.²⁰ In 1860 press telegrams ensured that the tour was given wide coverage in Britain, and the London Illustrated News carried sketches of the tour. In 1901 the wire services provided a host of British newspapers with even more detailed information about the tour, and a revolution in photography and printing technology meant that all the papers could carry pictures and photographs of the tour. Certainly the press, particularly the popular press in 1901, was motivated more by the desire to sell newspapers than by ideological considerations.²¹ Nonetheless, the press coverage served to increase public interest in Britain in the Greater Britain overseas and to strengthen the monarchy’s identification with the unity of the Empire. The tours thus contributed to what Cannadine has described as the trend toward exalting the monarchy to venerated Olympus.²² It is also plausible that the publicity given to the 1860 tour contributed to the success of the Confederation movement a few years later by helping to persuade the British political elite of the maturity and loyalty of the British North American colonies. The 1901 tour, which was even more exhaustively covered in the British press, reinforced the image that Canada and the self-governing colonies were solidly behind the South African War (which indeed was generally the case), thus strengthening Joseph Chamberlain’s position at home. Ironically, the enormous show of loyalty that greeted the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall in Canada and the other self-governing colonies also misled Chamberlain into believing that there was more support for imperial federation that was in fact the case.

Yet it is important to recognize that the real pressure for the tours came from the colonial—not the imperial—authorities and that the colonial politicians had their own agenda. The initial invitation to the Crown in 1859 came from the ministry of the United Province of Canada, but the ministries in all the other British North American colonies quickly sought to ensure that the tour would be extended to include them. It mattered little whether the colony was governed by conservatives or by reformers. There was virtually no support for republicanism in British North America in 1860, and British North American politicians, regardless of their ideological views, eagerly sought to appear on the platform with Edward and to bathe in his reflected glory and popularity. Even ethnic origin was no barrier. George-Étienne Cartier was outspoken in his defence of the monarchy and was one of the chief promoters of this memorable event.²³ Cartier may not have been typical of all French Canadians in the degree of his anglophilia, but his monarchism was shared by most of the French-Canadian elite, both clerical and secular.²⁴ For British North American politicians the tour provided an opportunity to demonstrate to a wider world, watching through the international press, the wonderful progress of the colonies and their splendid resources and opportunities. Indeed, as Ian Radforth has argued, the colonists sought to involve Native peoples in the tour largely as convenient foils who, in their ‘primitiveness,’ sharply set off the triumphal march of civilization begun by the colonists.²⁵ But boosterism was only part of the agenda. To mid-nineteenth-century Britons, wherever they lived, the monarchy was seen as the one institution that stood above politics and that could unify communities peopled by a variety of ethnic groups and factionalized by religious sectarianism.²⁶ And given the growing dominance of the United States on the North American continent there can be little doubt that the political leaders of the British North America were well aware of the need for a symbol around which British North Americans could unite.

In 1901 the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier was even more clearly motivated by domestic political considerations. In initially opposing the pressure to send Canadian volunteers to South Africa, Laurier had misread English-Canadian public opinion, and he paid a heavy price in the election of 1900 when he lost considerable support in Ontario and the West, the areas of the country where, at the government’s request, the Duke of Cornwall spent most of his time in 1901.²⁷ At every stop Laurier and his ministers were seen standing alongside the Duke and Duchess. One Conservative paper even complained that the artist of the Toronto Globe, a Liberal paper, placed Sir Wilfrid Laurier into his royal pictures very much more prominently than the Duke.²⁸ Several of the published accounts mention the gusto with which Laurier sang Canada’s national anthem, God Save the King. They do not recount what Laurier must have felt in hearing over and over Canada’s unofficial national anthem, The Maple Leaf Forever, an anthem declaring the Conquest to be a blessing for French Canadians, sung with enthusiasm by massed choirs of children at virtually every whistle stop in English Canada. Nor is it clear how enthusiastically Laurier cheered the veterans from South Africa who were presented with medals at every major stop, a ceremony inevitably followed by lengthy speeches about the need for greater imperial unity. Perhaps I am being too cynical. After all, by 1901 Laurier had moved a long way from his rouge origins, and there is no reason not to accept his enthusiasm for the monarchy at face value. Yet if one sees the tour as a conscious attempt by the political elite to manipulate Canadian public opinion, it does seem rather strange that Laurier was attempting to lead Canadians in a direction in which he did not want to go, towards greater participation in the Empire. In the aftermath of the tour he would spend much of his energy trying to hold back the forces unleashed by the growing imperial enthusiasm to which the Duke’s tour had contributed.

Indeed, there were distinct limits to the ability of anyone to control public events of this kind. Certainly the imperial authorities sought to stage-manage the ceremonies. In 1860 the Prince arrived in a ship decorated with candlesticks that had been taken from Lord Nelson’s ship, the Victory, after the battle of Trafalgar, and the Prince and his guests dined facing a portrait of Nelson