A ROYAL WELCOME?
THE first English king to visit Ireland without an accompanying army was George IV who arrived on August 17, 1821. He had come here in 1816 when he was regent, or acting king on behalf of his father King George III, who had gone mad.
Henry II had come to conquer Ireland in 1171, as did King John in 1210, while Richard II came with an army of 8,000 men in 1394 and again in 1399. James II came to Ireland in 1689 in an attempt to regain his crown, but William III came to stop him and defeated him at the Battle of the Boyne. George IV was the first king to visit Ireland since the Act of Union in 1801.
Ironically, on the same day the press was reporting his arrival at Dunleary, it was also reporting the death of his wife, Queen Caroline. There had been no love lost between them for some years. He had her banned from the coronation and had tried to divorce her for alleged infidelity. He remained in Dublin while her funeral was played out in England, amid rioting in which two people lost their lives.
Although George IV would be remembered as one of the less popular kings, he received a warm welcome in Dublin. Many of the public buildings and private homes of the city were highly decorated for the occasion. Flags and streamers floated from the roofs of private and public buildings. Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) was described as “particularly splendid”. There was a royal standard blowing proudly in the wind on top of Nelson’s Pillar.
The press engaged in gushing prose. “No monarch on the earth ever received a more enthusiastic tribute of devotional attachment to the royal person than the king received from his faithful Irish people on the ever-memorable 17th August,” the Freeman’s Journal declared. “The splendid ovation, the pompous triumph of ‘olden time,’ were but the shadow of a shade to the stupendous spectacle — the magnificent entry of the British Monarch into the capital of his Kingdom of Ireland. Dublin yesterday exhibited a display of pomp and pageantry, and pride, unsurpassed by anything in modern London.”
One of his first acts was to visit Trinity College Dublin. “Many of the members of the University had the honour of kissing the king’s hand, and they departed in high admiration of the dignified deportment and lofty affability of their beloved sovereign,” according to the Freeman’s Journal.
In time, it would become apparent that George IV was a staunch opponent of Catholic emancipation, but even Daniel O’Connell got caught up in the enthusiasm of the time. He decorated his home in Dublin and displayed a bright transparency on the drawing room window, inscribed: “George IV, the only king that declared the Crown was held in trust for the good of the people. Erin go Bragh.”
Before the king left Dunleary, which was renamed Kingstown in his honour, Daniel O’Connell presented him with a laurel crown. “He’s a real king, and asks us how we are,” one old rebel noted.
The king made quite an impression on the people of Dublin during his 18-day stay. He greeted people in a familiar style. It was reported that he “frequently showed himself in the streets of Dublin, where he made friends with the populace, shook rough followers by the hand and called them ‘Jack’.”
Other foreigners called Irish people Paddy or Mick, but King George IV called everybody in Dublin Jack. (Now the people of Dublin are proud to be called “the Jacks”.)
It was more than a quarter of a century and two new monarchs later before the next royal visit in 1849. George’s niece, Queen Victoria, sailed into Cove, Co Cork.
At the time, the Great Famine had been hitting parts of Cork particularly hard. Lord Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, sought to detract attention from the disaster by proposing a royal visit. In some Irish quarters Victoria was vilified as the “Famine Queen”. She had been monarch for more than 11 years but this was her first visit to Ireland. The time selected for her visit may not have been deliberately offensive, but it was certainly not chosen “with good taste or delicacy”, according to the Freeman’s Journal.
She had actually made the biggest personal donation of all towards famine relief — £2,000. Although American help was celebrated, the queen’s contribution was worth five times the biggest single American donation of $2,000 by noted philanthropist Gerrit Smith. In comparison with the Queen the Irish Catholic bishops donated £1,000 towards famine relief and £10,000 to a university project.
The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulmecid I, wished to send £10,000 in aid, but Queen Victoria asked that he only send £1,000 in order not to upstage her. He sent £1,000 and also secretly sent three ships with food. The British reportedly tried to stop those, but the food arrived in Drogheda and was left at the harbour by the Ottoman sailors.
Victoria was later vilified for supposedly only contributing £5 towards famine relief, the same day that she donated £5 to a Battersea dog shelter. The distortion went down in Irish folklore.
Victoria came to Ireland directly from Osborne House, her home on the Isle of Wight. She and her husband, Prince Albert, arrived in Cove at about 10pm on August 2, 1849.
They remained on the yacht for the night. They had expected inclement weather and had planned to shelter en route but the bad weather had not materialised so they arrived at Cove early.
The authorities in Cork City were caught by surprise and had yet to decorate the city. William Lyons, the lord mayor of Cork, went out to Cove to try to persuade Victoria to delay her visit to the city, but she had already decided to go. The mayor was told, however, that she had also decided to knight him.
She arrived in the city by boat at the Custom House and was greeted there by the mayor. He was promptly asked to kneel before her. Prince Albert handed her a sword and she laid it on each of the mayor’s shoulders and said, “Rise Sir William Lyons”.
Afterward she drove through the streets, which were lined with spectators. It was supposedly reported that the queen “pissed over Patrick’s Bridge”. That was supposedly a misprint that should have read, “passed over”.
The Manchester Guardian had once famously misprinted that she had “pissed over Westminster Bridge”. That story developed legs of its own and was probably applied by some jokers to most of bridges she crossed for the rest of her life. Local authorities in Cove were so impressed with Victoria’s visit that they asked her to change the name of their town to Queenstown. She promptly agreed. After leaving Queenstown on the morning of August 4, the royal yacht sailed to Kingstown.
Her arrival was well publicised, but the ship was delayed by weather and had to shelter overnight at Tramore. She was thus late arriving at Kingstown. Some people, who waited through the day for her arrival, were on the train back to Dublin when the royal yacht arrived.
Whether the Lord Lieutenant’s aim was to divert attention from the famine, he certainly seized on the opportunity to announce the controversial appointments of three history professors to the new colleges. The bulk of students at the colleges were going to be Catholics, so the Catholic hierarchy had asked that Catholic candidates whose sympathies would be in line with the bishops should fill the chairs of history.
Of the 60 people appointed, only one-third were Catholics, and all three people appointed to the chairs of history were Protestant. The Freeman’s Journal was particularly incensed that William Hinks, a Protestant preacher — and a former professor at a college training Protestant ministers — was appointed at Queen’s College, Cork (now UCC).
As a result, the Freeman’s Journal turned cool towards the royal visit to Dublin. The Queen visited a number of institutions — the Bank of Irish, Trinity College, the Royal Hospital, and the National School of Education. The response to her processions through the streets of the city was regarded as a reflection of the conflicting feelings about the visit.
“As her Majesty passed every point, she was warmly greeted by those who stood along the line, and by those who filled the windows,” the Freeman’s Journal noted. “When she had passed, that greeting ceased. It was performed as a duty. There was no enthusiasm to sustain it.”
Victoria’s next visit to Ireland was during the Great Industrial Exhibition in Dublin in 1853. It was the brainchild of William Dargan, the engineer who was responsible for building the first Irish railway. He provided £400,000 to fund the exhibition in the hope of introducing the industrial revolution to Ireland.
The queen’s appearance at the exhibition reportedly recalled the splendour of her coronation. She had announced that she wished to keep the pomp to a minimum during her five-day stay in Dublin. She attended the exhibition on four days during her stay, and this provided it with enormous publicity.
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