Afterword
The Prince of Wales
The tour of the British North American Colonies was considered a resounding success both as a diplomatic mission to strengthen mutual ties of friendship and in the training acquired by the future king. Perhaps no one was more surprised by the warm public praise given the Prince of Wales than his father, Prince Albert, who had been deeply disappointed by his son’s failure to excel in the rigorous academic curriculum he devised for him. When Edward became king at the beginning of a new century in 1901, the man who was considered a playboy prince improved relations with France and other European countries using the same tact and social skill evident during the royal tour. Christopher Teesdale, appointed the prince’s equerry in 1858, continued in this capacity until the year before his death in 1893.
The Duke of Newcastle
A month after the royal tour, Queen Victoria acknowledged its success by conferring the high honour on the Duke of Newcastle of Knight of the Garter. The duke continued to support the prospective union of the British North American Colonies, realized in the confederation of four of the colonies in 1867. Queen Victoria’s request that he investigate the plight of Indigenous people during the tour was derailed because the duke placed the inquiry in the hands of Richard Pennefather, former chief superintendent of the Indian Department and the subject of Indigenous complaints to the Crown. Pennefather either denied the basis of any grievances or maintained that measures were in place to prevent them in the future. The Duke died in office in 1864 at the age of fifty three.
General Bruce
In his capacity as governor of the Prince of Wales, General Bruce accompanied the prince on a tour of the Middle East in 1862. The goodwill tour was intended in part to prevent French control of the Suez Canal if the Ottoman Empire collapsed by fostering Egypt’s friendship with Britain. During the tour, the fifty-nine year old general contracted a fever and died after he returned to England.
Sir Henry Acland
Acland felt he had made his own unofficial contribution during the royal tour through the international relations he effected in the scientific and medical communities: promising to send Dr Smallwood a set of observations from Oxford’s Radcliffe Observatory; urgently advising colonial officials to follow the model of Britain in establishing a register for licensed physicians; engaging leading physicians in the important conversation about the comparative effectiveness of drug therapies. In ensuing years, during a distinguished professional life he continued to bring this same mediative or instrumental talent to his leadership, a leadership exercised both during his long tenure as Regius Professor of Medicine from 1858-94 that put the study of medicine at Oxford on a scientific footing and his leadership as president from 1874-87 of the General Medical Council as it sought to regulate standards in both medicine and public health.
In the years after the tour, Henry Acland and Sarah welcomed visitors into their Oxford home from both Canada and the United States including American scientists like the oceanographer, Maury, met at the Smithsonian in Washington, and literary figures like Longfellow, poet and Harvard professor of literature met in Boston. In a photo album that visitors might peruse in their drawing room, Acland kept a cherished picture of George-Etienne Cartier. In 1878, he lost his beloved wife, Sarah. Her health had begun to fail in 1876 and she was unable to rally after the death from typhoid fever of their fourth son, Herbert, pictured as a child in the family photo, who had gone to Ceylon to become a coffee-planter. In 1890, in recognition of his service to science at Oxford and to the medical profession, Queen Victoria knighted Acland as baronet. In 1900, six years after resigning as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, Henry Acland died at his home in Oxford.
Acutely aware of the fracturing of the unity between the sciences and religion, this distinguished physician and man of science asserted their unity to the end of his life. In the final phrases of his last will and testament, cited by his biographer, J.B. Atlay, Acland echoed Francis Bacon’s hopes articulated at the threshold of our scientific age: “And now with a deep sense of the mercy and goodness of God to me and mine….I pray that the faithful study of all nature may in Oxford and elsewhere lead men to the knowledge and love of God, to faith and to charity, and to the further prevention and relief of the bodily and mental sufferings of all races of mankind.”
The tour of the British North American Colonies was considered a resounding success both as a diplomatic mission to strengthen mutual ties of friendship and in the training acquired by the future king.