Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life by Lucy Worsley

Author:Lucy Worsley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Five years later, at half past nine on the grey morning of 24 August 1861, Victoria was travelling south-west from Dublin by railway. She was going deeper into Ireland, towards a gigantic military camp. More than 10,000 of her soldiers spent each summer practising drill on the long flat plain called the Curragh. This year, they’d been joined by Victoria’s eldest son Bertie, Prince of Wales, who was now just short of twenty.

The Curragh Plain was an ancient mustering ground for troops, which had been re-established as a military base in 1855 to train infantry destined for the Crimean War. The soldiers occupied hutments and tents sprawling along a ridge above a plain covered with furze, sheep and no fewer than forty-four prehistoric earthworks.1 The rich grassland of the Curragh Plain was also grazed by the horses that ran at its famous racecourse. It was ‘a splendid position’, Victoria thought, with ‘an immense amount of turf’.2 The turf still exists to this day despite the despoliations of the modern world, including a motorway. It is so intensely green in colour that it can only be described as emerald.

The army that had eventually bumbled its way to victory for Victoria in the Crimean War included some 37,000 Irishmen, 40 per cent of its strength. Yet Victoria had markedly different feelings towards Ireland than to her beloved Scotland. Like so many members of the British establishment, she had a deep-rooted suspicion of the Catholic Church.3 The two countries of Britain and Ireland had been spliced together into a United Kingdom only sixty years previously, a defensive measure on Britain’s part to make its colony less vulnerable to insurrection and French invasion. In 1861 Victoria had twice as many Irish as Scottish subjects. But the Irish were easily able to deduce their lesser status from her movements. During Victoria’s reign as a whole she spent seven entire years in Scotland, but only five weeks, over four visits, across the Irish Sea.4 She would also impatiently refuse suggestions that Bertie should become her permanent viceroy and representative in Ireland to give the country’s problems some of the attention they so clearly required.5

Whenever she did cross the Irish Sea, Ireland’s queen found the people and their suffering to be distressing. She made her first visit shortly after the Great Famine, the result of repeated failures of the potato harvest that had seen a million die and millions more emigrate. During this present trip of Victoria’s, a whole decade later, its effects could still be seen. Charles Kingsley, writing in 1860, found himself ‘haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw … if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours’.6 Victoria agreed, finding ‘more ragged and wretched people here than I ever saw anywhere else’.7 Like Kingsley, she found her Irish subjects to be not quite human: ‘the more one does for the Irish the more unruly and ungrateful they seem to be.

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