Prince of Hearts
Canada’s first royal tour – with Victoria’s son, Bertie – caused a sensation and was the start of a tradition
In 1860 Queen Victoria sent her 18-year-old son across the pond to Canada. It was our first royal tour, and it caused a sensation and started a tradition for the many tours that followed
“Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums! The Princely heir of England comes!” –R.J. de Cordova, The Prince’s Visit (1861)
Sixteen-year-old Lizzie Wilmot of Cobourg, Ont., was consumed with excitement. “Everybody in town was agog over the impending celebration,” she recalled more than 60 years later. “New gowns, decorations and surmises as to whom should dance with the Prince were the topics of the day … and locally, Mrs. Connells had fitted many fluttering hearts with taffetas and tarlatans and heavy embroidered satins.”
The focus of so many fluttering hearts was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the second of Queen Victoria’s nine children. The queen would have raised an eyebrow at the notion of her teenaged son as royal heartthrob since she found him rather plain (“handsome I cannot think him”). Nonetheless, in the summer of 1860, scores of young Canadian women nursed the impossible fantasy of winning the heart of the heir to the throne and becoming queen of Great Britain and the Empire.
The impetus for a royal visit to North America had begun with the construction of a Montreal railway bridge across the St. Lawrence that was hailed, with civic hyperbole, as “the eighth wonder of the world.” In May of 1859, the Parliament of the United Canadas invited Queen Victoria to officiate at the opening of this bridge that would be named in her honour. The queen was unable to attend, but it was decided that the Prince of Wales should come in her stead. Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, thought it would be good for Bertie, as he was known within the family, to make the first royal tour to North America. But they had plenty of misgivings. Bertie had always been their problem child. Prince Albert thought him rather dim since he did not excel at the strict Germanic schooling regimen he had devised for his children. Bertie’s elder sister, Vicky, in contrast, was able to discuss books with her father in three languages by the age of six. Yet some of Bertie’s more sympathetic tutors reported on his kind nature and affable manner, which they thought would serve him well in his royal role.
So it was that on July 10, 1860, the Prince of Wales and his retinue left Plymouth, England, on board the 91-gun HMS Hero, accompanied by steam frigate HMS Ariadne. On the morning of July 24, the prince stepped ashore in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to deafening cheers from thousands of spectators who had spent the night carousing and setting off fireworks. Despite a sudden downpour, the cheers continued as the prince processed in an open landau through the ceremonial arches erected across streets hung with patriotic banners, flags and bunting. At a ball that evening, the young prince danced with great gusto till 3 a.m., and a reporter from the New York Herald cheekily observed that: “His Royal Highness looks as if he might have a susceptible nature and has already yielded to several twinges in the region of his midriff.”
As Hero departed for Halifax the next day, all aboard agreed that the St. John’s visit had been a great success. In Royal Spectacle, his definitive study of the tour, historian Ian Radforth cites a letter from the prince’s governor, Maj.-Gen. Robert Bruce, to Prince Albert, reporting that his son had “entered cordially into the spirit of the thing.” The Prince Consort replied that all he knew about the place was the Newfoundland dogs and thus he could only picture the Prince of Wales “surrounded by these animals and their taking an animated part in the pre
vailing enthusiasm.” A Newfoundland dog was, in fact, presented to the prince, and it soon became a favourite of the crewmen on Hero.
“Halifax did not know itself on the 30th of July,” wrote the correspondent for The Times of London. “It was completely buried in green leaves and flowers and metamorphosed into a gigantic bouquet.” Other Maritime capitals such as Fredericton and Charlottetown followed suit, and evergreen trees and branches were used to disguise every shanty and shabby building. When the royal flotilla approached Montreal on Aug. 25, the steamers plying the St. Lawrence were ornamented with spruce trees and “even the very buoys were decorated.” As the largest and richest city in British North America, Montreal was determined not to be outdone in the splendour of its celebrations. Cannons boomed as the young prince stepped onto Bonsecours Market Wharf, and a crowd of 50,000 roared its welcome. In Radforth’s description, an enormous red and white pavilion stood on the wharf below which red carpeted stairs led up to a dais with a gilded throne. The prince was escorted up these stairs by the mayor of Montreal, Charles-Séraphin Rodier, who had draped his rotund figure in scarlet robes lined with white satin in imitation of the Lord Mayor of London. Rodier then proceeded to read his grandiloquent welcome in English and French and bowed so low each time the Crown was mentioned that his ceremonial sword poked skywards and his chain of office jingled against his boots, to the amusement of the foreign press.
That afternoon, the prince laid the final stone of the Victoria Bridge, which became the scene of a spectacular evening fireworks display. Two days later, he a attended what was billed as ““the largest ball ever held o on the Continent,” hosted in an elegant wooden pavilion constructed at the foot of Mount Royal. Surrounded by gardens lit by twinkling lanterns, the hall featured refreshment tables with fountains of champagne encircling a 300-foot dance floor on which the prince danced tirelessly till 5 a.m. The next night, more than 8,000 citizens dressed in their finest gathered in the ballroom for a gala concert that included a cantata written in the prince’s honour. The following day, he took part in a military review and paddled in a flotilla of birchbark canoes with Indigenous Canadians. As the royal party departed for Ottawa on Aug. 31, the ballroom complex began to be dismantled. In a more lasting tribute, Mayor Rodier erected a statue of Bertie atop his house on Rue Saint-Antoine and dubbed it Prince of Wales Castle.
A Gothic pavilion had been erected in Ottawa for the laying of the cornerstone of the new parliament buildings. The prince also visited Chaudière Falls beside which an enormous ceremonial arch had been constructed by Ottawa’s lumbermen using 180,000 feet of sawn lumber and assembled without a single nail. Lumbermen in neckerchiefs then escorted him on a thrill ride down the timber slide by the falls.
So far, the royal visit had been a smashing success but, on Sept. 4, as the prince’s party sailed on the lake steamer Kingston through the Thousand Islands in perfect sunshine, a storm was brewing that threatened to disrupt the entire tour. In Canada West (which became Ontario after Confederation), the Protestant Orange Order was a powerful force and the bane of the Roman Catholic Church. The Orangemen were dismayed by how prominently the Catholic clergy had received the prince in Quebec and were determined to show that they were the most loyal followers of the Crown in this part of Canada.