The proclamation issued in Victoria's name in 1858, when the Crown took over the government of India from the East India Company, is the clearest statement of the position the monarchy adopted. It declared that the sovereign disclaimed alike the right and the desire to impose her own convictions on her Indian subjects, and promised that none would be favoured or molested by reason of religious faith or observance. Victoria took a personal interest in the wording and pressed for language of toleration.
The policy and the practice diverged. Missionary societies operating under the same Crown continued to seek conversions, army chaplaincies and mission schools were funded from public money in ways that Indian observers noticed, and the promise of religious neutrality was invoked against the government as often as by it.
In her own household the interest went further than policy. From 1887 she took lessons in Hindustani from Abdul Karim, a Muslim attendant from Agra, kept journals in the language, and defended his standing against a court that resented him. She also worshipped, when in Scotland, in the Church of Scotland at Crathie, receiving communion there in 1873, which Anglican clergy protested because the Supreme Governor of one established church was communicating in another. The reign therefore holds two things at once: a sovereign at the head of a national church, and a sovereign whose subjects were mostly not in it.