It had been Barnum’s plan to proceed at once to London, but he learned that the royal family was in mourning because of the death of Prince Albert’s father, and he had made up his mind before he had been in England one week to present General Tom Thumb at Buckingham Palace, which, he naïvely admits, he intended to appropriate as his headquarters. Meanwhile, he presented his letters of introduction in Liverpool, and was induced by friends to hire a hall and give a few exhibitions. Mr. Maddox, of the Princess’s Theater, London, visited Liverpool incognito with the special purpose of sizing up Tom Thumb and possibly proposing an engagement to Barnum. An arrangement was made for three appearances at the Princess’s Theater, for Barnum was unwilling to contract with another showman for any long engagement, and he consented to the exhibition at the Princess’s only for the purposes of advertisement. To his first three performances in London General Tom Thumb attracted large crowds, and Barnum once more felt sanguine. He declined an offer for a reëngagement and prepared to exploit his prodigy on a grand scale. He hired Lord Talbot’s mansion in Grafton Street, where Lord Brougham was one of his neighbors, and from this house he sent invitations to the nobility and the editors to visit General Tom Thumb. They came in large numbers and told their friends about the General. The friends, who were not invited, also came in large numbers, and were turned away by the butler. Barnum was in England, and he planned to do what no English showman would have dared to do: he treated himself, unobtrusively, as an equal of every one from the Queen to the coster. But he also catered to their opinions of themselves. He realized that he must maintain a dignity, if he was to receive upper-class patronage, and he instructed the servants to admit no one to the private at-homes of General Tom Thumb without a ticket of invitation. But he was always careful to send invitations the next day to all those who had not been admitted. The premonitions of failure which he had suffered in Liverpool made Barnum certain that the only way to establish Tom Thumb financially in England was to make him the darling of fashion; the common people could be trusted to follow in the tracks of their betters. And Barnum knew also that the one road to sure success lay in the direction of approval by Her Majesty the Queen. He therefore turned all his persistent and cunning attention towards this consummation.