She was transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1897, during which time Empress of India was assigned to the International Squadron blockading Crete during the uprising there.

[3] The Royal Sovereigns were powered by a pair of three-cylinder, vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one shaft.

Their Humphrys & Tennant engines[2] were designed to produce a total of 11,000 indicated horsepower (8,200 kW) and a maximum speed of 17.5 knots (32.4 km/h; 20.1 mph) using steam provided by eight cylindrical boilers with forced draught.

The ships carried a maximum of 1,420 long tons (1,443 t) of coal which gave them a range of 4,720 nautical miles (8,740 km; 5,430 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph).

[3] Their main armament consisted of four breech-loading (BL) 13.5-inch (343 mm) guns mounted in two twin-gun barbettes, one each fore and aft of the superstructure.

[7] She was ordered under the Naval Defence Act Programme of 1889 with the name of Renown and was laid down on 9 July 1889 at Pembroke Dockyard.

[9] Empress of India was commissioned at Chatham on 11 September 1893 to relieve the ironclad battleship Anson as the flagship of the second-in-command of the Channel Fleet.

She participated in annual manoeuvres in the Irish Sea and English Channel as a unit of the "Blue Fleet", 2–5 August 1894.

[10] In June 1895, Empress of India was among the ships representing the Royal Navy at the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal in Germany.

She also was in Cretan waters on 6 November 1898, when members of her crew joined crewmen from the British battleship HMS Revenge in supervising the embarkation on the British torpedo gunboat HMS Hussar of the last Ottoman forces on Crete, which Hussar transported to Salonica.

[13] On 12 October, Empress of India paid off at Devonport, but she recommissioned the next day under the command of Captain Henry Louis Fleet,[14] to relieve the ironclad battleship Howe at Queenstown, Ireland, as both the coast guard ship there and as flagship to Rear-Admiral Edmund Jeffreys, Senior Naval Officer, Coast of Ireland Station.

The ship participated in the Coronation Fleet Review for King Edward VII held at Spithead on 16 August 1902,[16] and was back in Ireland later that month when she received the Imperial Japanese Navy armored cruiser Asama and protected cruiser Takasago at Cork.

The first ship to engage the stationary Empress of India was the light cruiser Liverpool, followed by two dreadnought battleships Thunderer and Orion and the predreadnought battleship King Edward VII, and finally the four dreadnoughts Neptune, King George V, Thunderer, and Vanguard.

[22] She had received forty-four 12-inch (305-mm) and 13.5-inch (343-mm) hits and "it is not surprising that an elderly ship sank,"[22] though the intention had been to repeat the firing at longer range before she did.

[22] When Empress of India sank, she settled upside-down on the seabed, and some salvage was soon carried out by a Jersey company which owned the rights to the vessel.