In 1882, the eldest sons of the Prince of Wales visited Palestine and Syria as they neared the end of a voyage around the globe. This chapter uses the written record of their journey on board HMS Bacchante to argue that it signalled important changes in the religious profile of the British monarchy. John Neale Dalton, the tutor to the princes, misrepresented his unintellectual pupils as keen students of the religions of the world in his voluminous two-volume journal of their tour. As British monarchs now headed an empire which its admirers argued was unprecedented in its extent, they prepared to rule it by travelling to encounter the many religions of their future subjects. Dalton’s princes journeyed through time as well as space, capitalising on British power and their royal standing to meet philologists and archaeologists who explained to them the ancient faiths of Japan, China and Egypt. In this global context, their visit to the Holy Land was no longer just a pilgrimage to the origins of Christianity and of elite culture, but a journey of discovery which connected the biblical to other, hitherto alien pasts.