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 London (11 May 1876). Disraeli's Indian policy also included the bestowal on her of a title which would declare her Indian sovereignty. The royal titles bill, which conferred on her the designation of empress of India, was the chief business of the session of 1876, and she fittingly opened it in person amid much popular enthusiasm (8 Feb.) The opposition warmly criticised Disraeli's proposal, but he assured the House of Commons that the new title of honour would only be employed in India and in Indian affairs. The bill passed through all its stages before 1 May, when the queen was formally proclaimed empress of India in London. After the close of the session she was glad of the opportunity of marking her sense of the devotion that Disraeli had shown her by offering him a peerage (21 Aug. 1876) ; his health had suffered from his constant attendance in the House of Commons, and he entered the House of Lords next year as Earl of Beaconsfield. On 1 Jan. 1877 at Delhi the governor-general of India, Lord Lytton, formally announced the queen's assumption of her title of empress to an imposing assembly of sixty-three ruling princes. Memory of the great ceremonial was perpetuated by the creation of a new Order of the Indian empire, while a new imperial Order of the Crown of India was established as a decoration for ladies whose male relatives were associated with the Indian government. The queen held the first investiture at Windsor on 29 April 1878. She gloried in her new distinction, and despite Disraeli's assurances soon recognised no restrictions in its use. She at once signed herself 'Victoria R. & I.' in documents relating to India, and early in 1878 she adopted the same form in English documents of state. In 1893 the words 'Ind[iae] Imp[eratrix] 'were engraved among her titles on the British coinage.

Her cheering relations with Lord Beaconsfield stimulated her to appear somewhat more frequently in public, and she played prominent parts in several military ceremonials in the early days of Disraeli's government. The queen had narrowly watched the progress of the little Ashanti war on the west coast of Africa, and at its successful conclusion she reviewed sailors, marines, and soldiers who had taken part in it in the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard at Gosport on 23 April 1874. At the end of the year, too, she distributed medals to the men. On 2 May 1876 she reviewed troops at Aldershot, and in the following September presented at Balmoral colours to her father's regiment, the royal Scots. She reminded the men of her military ancestry.

She suffered a severe shock in the autumn of 1875 when, while crossing to the Isle of Wight, her yacht, the Albert, ran down another yacht, the Mistletoe, and thus caused three of its occupants to be drowned in her presence (18 Aug. 1875) ; but during the early spring of 1876 she was more active than usual in London. She attended a concert given by her command at the Royal Albert Hall (25 Feb.) She opened in semi-state a new wing of the London Hospital (7 March). Two days later she inspected in Kensington Gardens the gorgeous Albert Memorial, the most elaborate of the many monuments to her husband, a colossal gilded figure of whom fills the central place. Thence, with her three younger daughters, she went to the funeral in Westminster Abbey of her old friend, Lady Augusta Stanley, whose death, after a thirty years' association, deeply moved her ; in memory of Lady Augusta she erected a monumental cross in the private grounds at Frogmore. Later in the season of 1876 she left for a three weeks' vacation at Coburg (31 March to 20 April) ; she travelled from Cherbourg through France, but avoided Paris, and on the return journey had an interview at La Villette station, in the neighbourhood of the capital, with the president of the republic, Marshal MacMahon. The meeting was a graceful recognition on her part of the new form of government. The German empress was once more her guest in May. While going to Balmoral a few months later, she unveiled at Edinburgh yet another Albert memorial (17 Aug.) For the first time since the prince consort's death she kept Christmas at Windsor, owing to illness in the Isle of Wight, and transgressed what seemed to be her settled dislike of court entertainments by giving a concert in St. George's Hall (26 Dec.)

During the two years that followed the queen was involved in the intricacies of European politics far more deeply than at any time since the Crimean war. The subject races of the Turkish empire in the Balkans threatened the Porte with revolt in the autumn of 1875. The insurrection spread rapidly, and there was the likelihood that Russia, to serve her own ends, might come to the rescue of the insurgents. Disraeli adopted Palmerston's policy of 1854, and declared that British interests in India and elsewhere required the maintenance of the sultan's authority invio-