Chapter Eight
Bayonet Constitution, 1887

When Lili‘u set foot on British soil for the first time, she landed on an island that was as distant from her own as could be. Even the breath of the horses seemed different: what caught Lili‘u’s attention was the steam coming from the nostrils of the chuffing steeds pulling her carriage, although the temperature outside was not cold. “I was told that the peculiar atmosphere of the city of Liverpool, damp to saturation, made this phenomenon quite usual,” Lili‘u later wrote.

Then the most densely populated town in England, Liverpool was home to an enormous pool of impoverished laborers who loaded and unloaded the British empire’s daily shiploads of cotton, sugar, and coal. Ringed by slums, the city also teemed with thieves and prostitutes. The sickly smell of rudimentary plumbing wafted from the grim rows of terrace houses, where a dozen families might share a single water tap and an outdoor toilet.

Nonetheless, the Hawaiian party enjoyed a marvelous meal during their stay in Liverpool, a luncheon at the town hall that included turtle, whitebait, dressed crab, and many toasts to the health of King Kalākaua. That evening, most of the party attended a performance of Hamlet, which Lili‘u decided to skip, instead spending a quiet evening in her hotel.

The next day, they left the sprawl of Liverpool for the English countryside, passing fields of brilliant yellow mustard blooms and meeting a member of the Colman family, makers of the famed English mustard. When the royal entourage finally reached London, an escort helped guide them through the thick snarl of carriages and pedestrian traffic arriving for the Jubilee. He led them to a suite of rooms at the Alexandra Hotel, on Hyde Park Corner, where princes from Japan, Siam, India, and Persia were also staying.

The normally raucous street sounds of central London were subsumed by a symphony of nail pounding, with hundreds of carpenters and laborers toiling to erect grandstands in a fortnight, before tens of thousands of people converged on London for the Jubilee celebrations. Unlike the relatively quiet streets of Honolulu, Britain’s capital bustled at all times of day and night, alive with street urchins, pickpockets, and the working poor. The world’s largest city was flooded with immigrants from all corners of Europe and the empire, including more than a hundred thousand fleeing famine-devastated Ireland—a number larger than the entire population of the Hawaiian islands.

By the time the Hawaiian party arrived in London, Queen Victoria herself was on her way from Balmoral, Scotland, with a brief stopover at Windsor Castle. Excitement was rising. Victoria had gradually emerged from years of secluded mourning following the death of her consort, Albert, in 1861. By midday on Monday, June 20, 1887, masses of people lining the streets strained to catch a glimpse of their monarch as her carriage headed toward Buckingham Palace.

That same day, Kapi‘olani and Lili‘u made their way to the palace past guards in their high bearskin hats to a reception room, where an official held a baton across the entrance to the door, lowering it so the Hawaiian royal party could enter. There they were greeted by Lord Salisbury, a tall, slightly stooped man in his late sixties. Lili‘u noticed that she and her sister-in-law were a source of curiosity to some of the British courtiers; she saw several ladies of the royal household peeking into the room where she and her sister-in-law were sitting, proving, as Lili‘u observed, that “human nature is about the same in the palace as in the cottage.”

A short time later, Kapi‘olani and Lili‘u were led into another room where Queen Victoria sat on a sofa. Walking about twenty-five feet toward the sovereign, wearing their specially made court dresses fitted with tight corsets that pinched their waists, Lili‘u and Kapi‘olani approached the short-statured British queen, who rose to kiss Kapi‘olani on each check and then turned to Lili‘u and kissed her on the forehead.

Kapi‘olani, who spoke no English, sat next to Victoria on the sofa. Their conversation was translated by the Hawaiian king’s private secretary, Curtis ‘Iaukea. Lili‘u sat in a nearby chair, as Victoria recalled having met Kalākaua, when he visited England during his around-the-world trip in 1881. When the visit concluded after more small talk, Victoria arose and once again kissed Kapi‘olani on both cheeks and Lili‘u on her forehead, as if she were kissing a child. The aged yet vital monarch, then sixty-eight, took Lili‘u’s hand “as though she had just thought of something which she had been in danger of forgetting, and said ‘I want to introduce you to my children.’” One by one they came forward to meet the exotic chiefesses from the faraway Pacific nation.

Lili‘u and other members of the Hawaiian party found themselves struggling with the hierarchical protocol followed by Queen Victoria’s court. In Hawai‘i, as heir apparent to the throne, Lili‘u’s position was considered equal to Kapi‘olani’s as queen. But in Britain her status was lower than her sister-in-law’s. That bothered Lili‘u, who behaved somewhat petulantly by threatening to return to Hawai‘i if she didn’t get her way, according to the courtier ‘Iaukea.

The Princess possessed a strong will and determination . . . her desire to have recognition equal to the Queen’s caused me many worried hours and much futile effort trying to persuade her that it was not possible in a country where the customs were different. After consulting with her husband, whose calm judgment was wise and sensible, however, she finally gave up her threatened departure for home and matters settled down to a busy routine again. But not for long.

Indeed, because John Dominis was not titled and thus not considered a member of the Hawaiian royal family, he was not seated with his wife or assigned the same carriage. Lili‘u soon wrote to her brother, asking him to make both her husband and Archibald Cleghorn princes, to avoid such embarrassment in the future. Although Lili‘u and the other members of the Hawaiian royal family admired and patterned themselves on Britain’s royal family, they felt very much like outsiders during their Jubilee visit.

When Lili‘u finally reached the waiting room for the royal ladies, after her sister-in-law, she discovered everyone was standing. A grand duchess turned to her and asked, “Why does not the queen sit down, so that we may all be seated,” referring to Kapi‘olani, the highest-ranking royal in the room. Hawai‘i’s gentle and slightly befuddled queen had not understood that the rest of the ladies would not take their seats until she did. Lili‘u signaled Kapi‘olani to sit.

Once the reception began, Lili‘u was dazzled by the tiaras and necklaces worn by royalty and ambassadors’ wives. She had never before seen such a grand display of priceless gems and the experience seems to have heightened her sense of just how far off and relatively impoverished her island kingdom was compared with the capital of the British empire. In the letter she wrote to Archibald Cleghorn from London, she said she was enjoying herself and mentioned that she and John would sit on the balcony of their hotel room, watching the handsome horse-drawn carriages go by. “It is magnificent, but sometimes I get tired of all that show,” she wrote.

Yet in a letter she wrote to her coachman in Honolulu, she alerted him to a package she’d arranged to have sent to him. It contained half a dozen coachman’s uniforms, the blue one of which she directed him to wear when he met her upon her return. Her purchase suggests she was far from indifferent to adopting European court customs herself.

The culmination of England’s glorious show took place on Jubilee Day. By late morning on June 21 the crowds lining the route to Westminster Abbey were dense—an estimated 3 million people came to London that day to celebrate, adding to the already-thronging population of 5.5 million. Some people had secured their spots along the route by spending the night on camp stools, huddling beneath blankets to keep warm. By midmorning the dense crowds, coupled with the warm weather, caused several ladies to faint.

Even the dignitaries invited to attend the service at Westminster Abbey arrived many hours ahead of time, drinking from flasks and nibbling on sandwiches brought wrapped in paper. As the Hawaiian royal party approached, the congregants inside the abbey heard a roar of cheers for the queen of the Sandwich Islands. Then came a blare of trumpets announcing that Queen Victoria had entered her carriage. The lords and ladies hurriedly stashed the newspapers that had helped them pass the time during their long wait and hastily rewrapped the uneaten portions of their sandwiches. The crowd let out a loud and continuous roar, punctuated with cries of “Here she is!,” “I have seen her!,” and “She is alive!”

Westminster Abbey, where every English king had been crowned since 1066, was packed, with the ladies brightening its gloomiest recesses with their pink, mauve, and saffron gowns. In contrast, the small figure that Lili‘u saw as she made her way down the central aisle wore her usual gown of somber black, brightened only by a white hat with a plume of white feathers and a tightly spaced row of diamonds. As Victoria proceeded through an arched door and into the nave, accompanied by a Handel processional thundering from the abbey’s great organ, Lili‘u and the entire congregation of some nine thousand people rose as one.

Kapi‘olani and Lili‘u sat near Queen Victoria, in the choir. Kapi‘olani wore an extraordinary blue velvet gown, tightly fitted and trimmed with wide bands and panels made from scores of peacock feathers. Toward the end of the service, Queen Victoria rose and, seemingly out of a spontaneous outflow of feeling, kissed and embraced the nearly three dozen members of her immediate family who joined her that day. Did Lili‘u ponder Queen Victoria’s blessings of having so many children and a secure throne as she watched?

That evening, Buckingham Palace hosted a gathering for visiting royalty; London’s midsummer night sky glowed with streaks of phosphorescence and houses lit with colored fairy lights. Even the grand old lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, lit no fewer than ten thousand gas lights on the night of the Jubilee, some ruby colored and others in the shape of a dozen large stars. At 10 p.m. Britons lit beacon fires on the highest points of the British Isles, including Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, an extinct volcano whose name is said to have been derived from the King Arthur legend. Asked how she was afterward, Queen Victoria replied, “I am very tired, but very happy.”

A week of Jubilee events followed, including a children’s fete in Hyde Park and the queen’s garden party, which took place amid the lawns, graveled walks, and rose bushes of Buckingham Palace. But as Lili‘u enjoyed the last of the celebrations and visited the Tower of London’s rack and the dungeon, reports of a more frightening nature to the heir apparent of Hawai‘i’s throne began reaching her in London. Some newspapers had began publishing terse reports of “excitement and possible revolution” in Hawai‘i.

Lili‘u got word of the upheaval immediately following Queen Victoria’s garden party, once she returned to her hotel. The royal party made haste for Liverpool to catch the steamer Servia back to New York, resting just long enough to secure sleeping cabins on the overland train. It then rushed across the country to San Francisco in uncomfortably hot summer weather and boarded the steamer for Honolulu just fifteen days after leaving London.

Most likely it was in San Francisco where Lili‘u received two distressing letters, one from her brother and another from her friend Charles Wilson.

Honolulu, July 5/87

Dear Sister,

We are just passing through a tremendous Crises. Happily averted since Tuesday 28 of June of last week. I have appointed my Ministers. Mr. Green as Minister of Finance and Premier. Mr. Thurston as Minister of Interior and Mr. Godfrey Brown Minister [of] Foreign Affairs. Mr. C.A. Ashford Attorney General. Both Thurston and Ashford have made necessary apologize for their former conduct towards me. So we are now in full sympathy and I think we can get along together.

But the fault of the whole matter is that the firms of Brewer & Co., E.O. Hall & Son, J.T. Waterhouse and Co., S.N. Castle & Co., have distributed promiscuously the arms to every body that now I believe they regret it not being able now to quiet matters.

Lili‘u must have puzzled over the news that her brother had seemingly accepted a cabinet comprised of some of his fiercest critics, especially Lorrin Thurston. But Wilson’s letter, written the same day, was likely to have unsettled her even more.

Honolulu July 5, 1887

My Dear Princess,

Since my last, everything was peaceable, until this morning, a false rumor got afloat that His Majesty was corresponding with Mr. Gibson and inciting the Native population to an uprising against the Whites and also that His Majesty was having ammunition and Arms prepared in and around the Palace premises.

Wilson reported that his inquiries found the rumors to be “false and without any foundation” and wrote that the king and the new cabinet met that morning, with the ministers assuring Kalākaua they would direct that “the Citizens disperse and go quietly to their homes.” Wilson ended by assuring Lili‘u that “everything has quieted down.”

Lili‘u and Kapi‘olani had plenty of time to ponder the meaning of those letters aboard ship, as they took in the fresh ocean air on deck. They tried to distract themselves by knitting, reading, and singing Hawaiian songs. On July 23, while still at sea, Lili‘u wrote, “A lovely day—nothing but knitting to do—but as fast as my needles fly my thots seem to fly even faster.”

Her worries multiplied overnight, and the following day she wrote in her diary, “My heart is sad tho’—for affairs at home seem dark. My poor brother!”

In Honolulu, the sun shone brightly on June 21, the day planned for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations. Stores and government offices were closed and residents flew flags in front of their homes to celebrate. At 8 a.m. gunfire erupted from the battery on Punchbowl Hill as churchbells rang. At Kapi‘olani Park, in the shadow of Diamond Head, a series of sporting events got under way, including shotput throws, high jumps, and sack races. The Advertiser declared the rush for free food “execrable,” reporting that “a crowd of young hoodlums, dark skins as well as fair . . . rushed the booth, crowded round the buffet, seizing in their fists lumps of meat and whatever else came their way.” Eventually the police were called in. But the crowd was more orderly that evening. The Royal Hawaiian Band played for a dance attended by several hundred people, while the British minister hosted an elegant reception at his home attended by some ali‘i.

Yet a crisis was building in Kalākaua’s kingdom. For one thing, Walter Murray Gibson, the statesman upon whom the king had increasingly relied to help him govern, was burdened by a host of physical and personal problems. He was still a tall, handsome man but his shoulders now drooped, his long beard had turned snow white. The gauntness brought on by illness made him look more than ever like an Old Testament prophet. For months, the kingdom’s prime minister had been suffering from various chest and stomach ailments. Compounding his troubles, the widower then in his early sixties was named in a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed he had broken his promise to marry her. In his diary, he described her as “a miserable schemer.”

Just as his personal affairs grew more vexing, Gibson’s worries over affairs of state multiplied. His anxiety about the Kaimiloa—the retrofitted guano steamer heading to Samoa—kept him up at night. Also vexing him were two “gifts”—one for $75,000 and the other for $80,000—that the king had allegedly accepted from two separate Chinese men, each seeking to win a single potentially lucrative opium license that the government planned to grant. The Hawaiian Gazette caught wind of the story and published an investigative bombshell about the bribes paid to the king to win the license, based on lengthy affidavits. Public opinion, particularly in the haole community, rapidly turned against both Kalākaua and Gibson with what was presented, perhaps unfairly, as the latest example of his corruption.

Reflecting this sentiment, the American minister to Hawai‘i forwarded to Washington, D.C. a complete set of the affidavits supporting the story and detailing what became known as the opium scandal. “Of late I have heard it remarked that no change would be satisfactory unless it was one deposing the King, changing the Constitution, and adopting a republican form of government,” the minister wrote, adding that he had urged the king’s critics to be moderate.

But the Gazette, the most outspoken of the papers opposed to the king, hammered away at Kalākaua and Gibson on an almost daily basis, editorializing that “the end must come to the present era of extravagance, corruption, and incompetence.”

Such strong views were not confined to newsprint. In Honolulu, a secret organization that would become known as the Hawaiian League had formed earlier in the year with the goal of reforming government and reining in the powers of the king. Sanford Dole hosted the first meeting in his home and the leader who emerged was none other than Dole’s friend Lorrin A. Thurston, a lawyer and firebrand editorial writer for the Bulletin, who had been elected to the legislature in 1886. Dole and Thurston served on an executive committee of thirteen men—all of them haole—that became known as the Committee of Thirteen. With a membership that rapidly grew into the hundreds, the group split into radical and conservative wings. Among the extremists, there was talk of creating a republic and even of assassinating King Kalākaua by shooting him in cold blood.

Despite the distractions of his personal affairs, Gibson was alert to the rising danger posed by the Hawaiian League and its military arm, a volunteer all-white militia known as the Honolulu Rifles. He had already placed an informer inside the two groups and soon began to obtain information about their plans. He quickly grasped the threat they posed. In his diary entry from June 10, he wrote, “The tempest seems to be rushing to a climax . . . Had I been in good health perhaps I might have prevented some of these disasters but my poor body cannot keep up with mind or spirit. I am weary, languid, listless, oh, so weary.”

The king’s enemies came from the white business class and they organized rapidly. To avoid police surveillance, Kalākaua’s opponents held meetings at different locations each evening. As the atmosphere in town grew tense, many members of the Hawaiian League began arming themselves—buying rifles and ammunition at Honolulu hardware stores. On Tuesday, June 28, fresh supplies of arms arrived aboard the steamer Australia from San Francisco. Castle & Cooke and other merchants put them on sale the next morning. They were popular: the Daily Bulletin reported “for several hours a regular run was kept up on the deadly weapons.”

Aware of this surge in arms sales, Kalākaua’s government began fortifying the palace and other government buildings to prepare for an attack by haole opponents, including barricading the palace gates, just as Charles Wilson’s letter had described. Kalākaua’s ministers and loyalists could not have missed the notices posted around town of a mass meeting planned by the league in two days, on June 30. When the time came, Kalākaua himself called out the Rifles—whom he mistakenly thought were still loyal to him—before noon that day to maintain order.

Composed of Honolulu’s mercantile leaders, the league held tremendous sway. It ordered all of the town’s grog shops closed and set guards to watch for fires and to prevent possible contamination of the water supply. It also posted more than 150 men in uniform, carrying fixed bayonets and fifty rounds of ball cartridge apiece, at the front entrance to the armory of the Honolulu Rifles, a one-story building on the corner of Beretania and Punchbowl streets, just a few blocks from the palace. The militiamen wore uniforms that bore a close resemblance to a standard U.S. Army pattern of dark blue with red facings.

At 2 p.m. Dole called the meeting of perhaps a thousand or more people to order. Although he had resigned from the Hawaiian League after the radicals in the party began pushing to overthrow the monarchy, he still agreed to open the gathering. After Dole spoke, Lorrin Thurston mounted the podium wearing the uniform of the Honolulu Rifles.

In a booming voice that could be heard to the very back of the overflowing hall, he read a set of resolutions that he and other members of the league’s Committee of Thirteen had prepared. Casting his dark eyes downward, the young politician with the thinning hair and handlebar mustache read a list of demands to the king. These demands might have been reasonable, from citizens of the Kingdom, but many of the people making them were, in fact, resident aliens who wanted to vote and hold office even though they were not naturalized citizens. Calling for the dismissal of the cabinet and of Walter Gibson, Thurston railed against the payments for the opium license, calling “to remove the stain now resting on the throne.”

He then moved on to the heart of the league’s demands: the king should not interfere with the election of representatives, “unduly influence” legislation or legislators, or use his official position for private ends. Many have
had their businesses almost entirely ruined by the king’s “mal-­administration,”
he fumed. Would they ever take Kalākaua at his word again?

“No!” shouted the men in the room.

What they needed was a radical change in the constitution!

Amid cheers, Thurston declared that the Committee of Thirteen would personally present their list of demands to Kalākaua and give him just twenty-four hours to reply. “We want the King to think of the public good, not of personal ends,” added another of the king’s critics. “We have just seen the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and if Kalākaua would follow her example, he might reign as long.” In other words, they wanted a largely ceremonial figure on the throne, not one who would attempt to actively rule the country. The crowd passed the resolutions read by Thurston with a resounding chorus of “ayes.”

Without a pause, members of the Committee of Thirteen took the printed resolutions and marched to the palace, demanding a written response from the king within twenty-four hours. Tensions in rumor-rife Honolulu rose even higher, the next morning, as a fresh delivery of seven cases of firearms arrived on the Mariposa. Word spread that the arms were meant for the government, to put down the rebellion. The Honolulu Rifles sprang into action, seizing the cases. Only upon prying the boxes open did they discover they contained guns of a type commonly used by Chinese planters to drive birds from their rice fields.

Order rapidly broke down, as members of the Hawaiian League and the Rifles turned their fury on Walter Murray Gibson. At this point, the Committee was in charge of the city. Confined to house arrest on June 30, he jotted down in his diary entry that day: “Threats of violence . . . Rumors of armed mob, purpose to lynch me. Col Ashford [the head of the Honolulu Rifles] informs me that I will be shot down if I attempt to leave my house. The mob around my house—an anxious night.”

The next day, however, was even worse for the statesman once satirized as the Shepherd Saint of Lāna‘i. Gibson’s son-in-law paid him a visit around ten that morning at his home. The two men sat together talking in Gibson’s parlor when Colonel Ashford burst into the room, ordering them to put on their hats and follow him. A detachment of artillerymen from the Rifles prodded the pair past jeering crowds lining the sidewalks to the Pacific Navigation Company’s warehouse near the docks, apparently intending to hang them both.

When they entered the vast iron structure, they saw a noose already dangling from one of the roof beams and an area cleared of freight and baggage for the hanging. The high silk hat that Gibson had been wearing was knocked to the ground as the sergeant in charge, tying their hands behind their backs, pushed him and his son-in-law toward the rope. The crowd shouted obscenities at the pair, hungering for an execution. The son of a prominent missionary family made his voice heard above the crowd, shouting, “Hang them! Hang them!”

Just as the militiamen were dropping the noose around Gibson’s neck, an infuriated, shouting female, using her folded umbrella as a weapon to poke and prod her way through the crowd, confronted the surprised soldiers and demanded that they halt. It was Talula, Gibson’s daughter, who had arrived to try to save her father and husband from the noose.

Described as a “brave girl” in Gibson’s diary entry of July 1, Talula had stood up for him against what had rapidly turned into a vigilante mob. James Wodehouse, the lanky British consul to Hawai‘i, notable for his drooping mustache and his daily walks with his pair of red dachshunds, also broke through to intervene, claiming that Gibson was of English parentage and that harming him would touch off an international incident. This was enough to halt the hanging. Gibson and his son-in-law were then allowed to return home until July 5.

During the period when Gibson was under house arrest, he tried to pass messages to the king, according to an account by Isobel Strong, who wrote about her experience of having been enlisted as a courier by the embattled ex-premier. She arrived at the gate of Gibson’s house and saw two young men, salesmen who had waited on her in downtown shops, dressed in military uniforms.

I nodded amiably and was about to walk in when, to my amazement, they crossed their rifles before me with a curt “Halt!”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You can’t go in,” was the surprising answer. “Mr. Gibson is under arrest and no one is allowed to see him.”

It struck me as ridiculous and with a “Pooh to you!” I dodged under the rifles and walked up the path. As they had no orders to shoot ladies in the back I reached the house safely.

Gibson then gave her a message in Hawaiian to relay to Kalākaua. She went to the palace and found him under watch. Thinking quickly, Strong feigned she was sketching but instead wrote out the message, which she did not understand the meaning of. The king read it, thanked her, and Strong left the palace. A week or so later Kalākaua received her in the palace’s empty throne room.

“I am not asking you what the message meant,” Strong said. “But I would like to know why the Missionary Party is making so much trouble for your Majesty?”

“It is not me, personally, at all,” he explained. “What they want is my country. They are hoping to annex Hawai‘i to the United States. It has been a steady fight ever since I came to the throne.”

“Take the islands away from you,” she exclaimed.

“Not while I live,” said the king. He then rewarded her with the Order of the Star of Oceania for her service to the kingdom.

Despite Isobel Strong’s success in passing along Gibson’s mysterious message to the king, Gibson and his son-in-law were indicted on embezzlement charges and moved to the O‘ahu prison, preventing further such communiqués.

The day of the June 30th mass meeting, representatives of the Hawaiian League had told Kalākaua that they would be delivering a new constitution for his signature. The rumor was that if the king refused to sign there would be bloodshed. Tension mounted as hours and then days passed without any word from the king, who remained out of public view. Adding to the apprehension, workmen placed large iron bolts and bars on the palace gates. The New York Times reported that in the basement of the palace three hundred armed Hawaiians had formed a volunteer regiment, prepared to defend their king at a moment’s notice.

Some people hoped Kalākaua would refuse to sign the constitution, especially since three British warships and one French man-of-war were expected to arrive in Honolulu harbor at any time, potentially serving as a counterforce to the Americans. But on Wednesday, July 6, a group of representatives from the Hawaiian League made their way to the palace. They then read the document to the king, “who listened in a sullen, and somewhat appalling silence,” according to an account written by C. W. Ashford, one of the league members present.

The king questioned and argued with the group of haole, going back and forth, and then retreated into silence—“for considerable periods appeared to be gazing into space and weighing the probabilities of success in the event of a refusal.” Finally, at just after 6 p.m. that day, Kalākaua’s “forbidding countenance . . . dissolved into a smile, sweet as seraphs were, as, with apparent alacrity, the King reached for a pen and attached his signature to that instrument whereby he was reduced from the status of an autocrat to that of a constitutional sovereign.”

The perspective of the Hawaiian League member who described this moment, however, was very different from that of Kalākaua’s supporters, who believed the king had signed the document only under fear of death. Indeed, considering that the new constitution radically reined in Kalākaua’s authority, there is little doubt he would have signed it unless he had been under dire threat. Even Lorrin Thurston, chief instigator of the new constitution, noted that, “Unquestionably the document was not in accordance with the law; neither was the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Both were revolutionary documents, which had to be forcible effected and forcibly maintained.”

The constitution also reduced the political power of native Hawaiians by imposing property requirements for membership in the house of nobles, and requiring voters to meet those same requirements in order to elect representatives to that body. There was no property qualification for voting or membership in the assembly; now, enfranchisement was no longer a right reserved for subjects of the kingdom but extended to all males of Hawaiian, American, or European descent who were in good standing with their taxes, who took an oath to support the new constitution, and who could read and write Hawaiian, English, or a European language.

However, the new constitution disenfranchised nearly eighteen thousand of the kingdom’s subjects of Chinese ancestry. And because it gave the legislature the power to dismiss cabinets, the result was that no single leader, including the king, held power enough to effectively be able to lead the nation. In short, the new constitution produced no less than governance gridlock in the years ahead.

The new constitution outraged many native Hawaiians and, on July 25, about three hundred of them streamed into a Honolulu church for a meeting to discuss the upcoming election. “There is a little goodness in the new Constitution, but much to condemn,” said one speaker, J. M. Poepoe, who urged the group to elect representatives who would oppose it. They “want to exercise the same power here as they do in their own country. They are doing it little by little, and it will not be long before Hawai‘i becomes an entire republic.”

Among those who believed that the king had been forced to sign, the document became known as the “Bayonet Constitution”

The morning of July 26, 1887, dawned clear as the steamer Australia made its way across the Pacific. By the time the queen and princess arose for their final day on board the ship, they could see the island of Moloka‘i on the port side. After a few miles, they caught sight of O‘ahu’s tall mountains soaring above the clouds, and then they spotted the jagged promontory of Diamond Head. By 10:30 that morning the steamer had reached Waikīkī. After more than three months away, Kapi‘olani and Lili‘u had returned safely home.

The large crowd that gathered at the wharf to greet the arriving passengers erupted into cheers when the first of the royal party emerged. But the feeling on that unusually warm Tuesday morning in July was more than just gratitude for the safe delivery of the two chiefesses after their journey nearly halfway around the globe. The mournful expressions on the faces of the native Hawaiians in the crowd alerted Lili‘u that a far more serious chain of events had occurred during her absence than her brother had revealed to her in his letter.

She and Kapi‘olani were met on their arrival by the king’s new cabinet, including Lorrin Thurston. Four months earlier, when she and the queen had left for England, Kalākaua’s four-member cabinet had included three native Hawaiians. When they returned only white men occupied the cabinet posts, all of whom except Thurston were foreigners born in Britain and North America, and all of whom had been members of the Hawaiian League.

Lili‘u and the queen stepped into the carriage and went directly to ‘Iolani Palace. Waiting for them at the entrance, Kalākaua greeted them brightly. But Lili‘u saw that he had suffered during their absence; to at least one member of the royal household, the king’s sister seemed to make no attempt to conceal her feelings of disapproval after having learned of his many concessions. Even so, she was not insensitive to the toll of the past few months. “We could see on his countenance traces of the terrible strain through which he had passed, and evidences of the anxiety over the perilous position.” Having witnessed for herself the pomp and adoration for Queen Victoria, signaling the British monarch’s important symbolic hold over her empire, Lili‘u must have felt deeply apprehensive at the muted homecoming her royal party received, and anxious as well about King Kalākaua’s increasingly shaky hold on the throne.