The first person to address Queen Victoria as “Your Majesty” when she became “Queen of Great Britain and Ireland” on June 20th, 1837, was one of the Conynghams of Slane Castle in Co Meath.
Francis Conyngham, Earl of Mount Charles, raced from Windsor Castle in Berkshire to Kensington Palace in London and knelt before 18-year-old Princess Victoria to tell her that her uncle King William IV had died earlier that morning and to kiss her hand as queen.
Conyngham, as Lord Chamberlain, was the dead king’s senior household officer at Windsor Castle. That post had been secured for him by his mother, Lady Elizabeth Conyngham, who was a mistress of King William’s elder brother and predecessor, King George IV.
Lady Conyngham had also fixed Francis Conyngham’s first job at Windsor Castle as a page of honour to her lover, the future King George IV. She was, in the words of Victoria biographer Lucy Worsley, “the last, and most impressively buxom, of George IV’s string of bosomy mistresses”.
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A contemporary description of her said that she had “not an idea in her head; not a word to say for herself; nothing but a hand to accept pearls and diamonds with, and an enormous balcony to wear them on”.
Francis Conyngham was given a number of government appointments and he became MP for Donegal while being an absentee landlord of large estates in Donegal, Clare and Meath for decades, including during the worst years of the potato famine.
A fellow MP, George Agar Ellis, described him as “stupid and ignorant” with “slender” writing ability. Conyngham died in London in 1876 having, according to a history of the British Parliament, “devoted the last 40 years of his life largely to yachting and the development of his racing stud in Ireland”. His titles and estates passed to his elder son, George Henry Conyngham.
Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years and 216 days, until her death on January 22nd, 1901. She visited Ireland four times, spending, cumulatively, five weeks here: in 1849, 1853, 1861 and 1900. (During her reign she spent an aggregate of seven entire years in Scotland and one full year on the French Riviera). She first set foot in Ireland not long after the worst years of the famine on August 2nd, 1849, at Cobh. She immediately sanctioned it being renamed in her honour and it was known as Queenstown for the next three-quarters of a century.
The vice-regal lodge in the Phoenix Park, now Áras an Uachtaráin, was renovated in advance of her visits and the trees that she planted there still stand, one on the lawn in front of the southern portico and another on an avenue known as the Queen’s Walk.
The universities that were established in Belfast, Cork and Galway in the 1840s were officially named Queen’s Colleges. The still-pristine large letterbox embedded in the stone wall on Galway city’s eponymous University Road is painted An Post green, while bearing in raised relief a British crown symbol between the large letters V and R for Victoria Regina.
Victoria was vilified by many people in Ireland as “the famine queen”. In the worst year of the potato famine, 1847, she told the opening session of parliament: “In Ireland the loss of the usual food of the people has been the cause of severe sufferings, of disease, and of a greatly increased mortality among the poorer classes.”
She added: “Outrages have become more frequent, chiefly directed against property; and the transit of provisions has been rendered unsafe in some parts of the country.”
She oversaw two fundraising campaigns for famine relief in Ireland and donated more than £2,000 from her personal fortune to them, but she ignored pleas for aid from Canada (one of her “Dominions beyond the seas”) when tens of thousands of Irish people fleeing the famine began to arrive there diseased or having died at sea.
Events in Ireland caused Victoria further grief in 1861 when her husband (and first cousin), Prince Albert, became distressed and terminally ill, aged 42, after learning of “that dreadful business at the Curragh”: how their eldest son and heir, Edward Prince of Wales, had lost his virginity there to one of the local prostitutes, known as the wrens.
She mourned her husband for the rest of her life, wearing only black clothing and commissioning in his memory London’s Royal Albert Hall, the gilded Albert Memorial nearby and the Victoria and Albert Museum, which she initially wanted to call simply the Albert Museum.
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