Before 1821, William III had been the last royal visitor to Ireland, his presence in 1690 coinciding with that of James II who had arrived a year earlier. As the London Observer acknowledged in August 1821, and not without cause, when previous English monarchs visited Ireland, ‘blood heralded their approach, blood marked their progress, [and] blood tracked their return … to the Irish people the presence of an English king has been hitherto inauspicious – the herald of war – the prelude to confiscation – or the mortifying remembrance of conquest’.Footnote 1 The arrival of George IV, the first Hanoverian to visit the country, was seen to signal a new engagement between Ireland and the British crown. Accordingly, when the visit was announced, expectations were high on all sides.
The visit was brief, lasting for twenty-three days during August and September 1821, but it was reported on extensively in the newspapers of the day and was the subject also of a range of poems, verses and songs. Interest in the subject was not sustained thereafter, and it was not until the beginning of this century that it attracted historical attention, with the most comprehensive analysis to date of the royal visit to be found in James Loughlin's The British monarchy and Ireland: 1800 to the present. Footnote 2 This concentrates mainly on the politics of the royal visit. James H. Murphy's Abject loyalty: nationalism and monarchy in Ireland during the reign of Queen Victoria deals briefly with the 1821 visit, and examines the significance of monarchy and the public reaction to it in nineteenth-century nationalist Ireland.Footnote 3 Both Loughlin and Murphy focus mainly on the immediate successes of the royal visit. However, George IV's visit in 1821 did not bring any lasting benefit. Indeed, this article argues that even before George had left Ireland, it was already apparent that some of the demonstrations of loyalism during the visit were more calculated than deeply felt.
I
George IV was crowned king on 19 July 1821. While, as early as February 1821, he announced his intention to visit Ireland, there appears to have been no particular reason for the journey other than that it was his royal pleasure.Footnote 4 This was sufficient for those who were disposed to look favourably upon the monarchy. The Belfast News Letter reflected contentedly that Ireland was close to the king's heart as she had been ‘the genius of his councils and the guide to his glory’.Footnote 5 The reality was more prosaic. George IV was unpopular, both as regent and as monarch. In the months leading up to his coronation, the British public was in what Christopher Hibbert describes as ‘an irritable restless humour’.Footnote 6 A troubled Mary, Lady Jerningham observed that the ‘country is, I fear, nearer to disaster than it has been since the days of Charles 1st … the spirit of the present time is most alarming’.Footnote 7 The king was hissed at as he drove to parliament and had missiles thrown at him. Taxation had risen following the Napoleonic wars, petitioners for reform were becoming more vocal and fears of civil unrest spread. Throughout the spring of 1820 George IV's unseemly conflict with his wife, Queen Caroline, became more public and, in an attempt to seek a divorce and to prevent her from being crowned as his queen consort, evidence was submitted to parliament claiming that she had committed adultery, effectively putting her on public trial. Despite the damning evidence presented against her, the queen continued to be popular and remained a figurehead for those demanding reform. The king was held up to ridicule and became the subject for caricaturists and satirists throughout the kingdom.Footnote 8
Following the vicissitudes of the months leading up the coronation, George IV determined to inaugurate his reign with visits to Ireland, Hanover and Scotland. Anticipating a triumphal reception, his advisers forecast that he would return from Ireland ‘in the highest state of elation’ as he was looked upon in that part of the kingdom ‘as a demigod’.Footnote 9 His private secretary, Benjamin, Lord Bloomfield, predicted that the king would be received in Ireland with ‘greater and more general popularity than could have been conceived’.Footnote 10 The Newry Telegraph, anticipating a warm reception in Ireland, hoped for more than just a ceremonial visit. It extolled the virtues of Ireland's ‘lively, active, social, warm-hearted, generous, but calumniated people’ in a ‘country on which the Almighty has beneficently poured forth the exhaustless blessings of fertility’, and expressed the hope that the king would investigate the causes of the ‘unnatural poverty … amidst a superabundance of wealth’. All Ireland needed, the editor asserted confidently, was for the king to ‘unite his children in bonds of fraternal affection’ in order to ensure their future prosperity.Footnote 11
There was no protocol for receiving a royal visitor to Ireland in peacetime, though the country was not untouched by the late eighteenth-century surge in royalism in England when civic pride increased and changed the nature of official celebration. There, attendance at royal events was facilitated by days off work, free food and drink, bonfires, fireworks and military processions. Mark Harrison has described the ‘unprecedented mass mobilisation around patriotic events’ that took place after the 1790s.Footnote 12 In her work on George III, Linda Colley has established how the appetite for royal and national spectacle gained momentum, and showed how the commercialisation of such events helped to publicise them and to heighten public anticipation.Footnote 13
The situation was not altogether different in Ireland, but economically matters were not so positive. Ireland was plunged into a long phase of economic malaise following the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Deflation and a series of economic depressions resulted in widespread reduction of wages, unemployment and distress. To compound matters, the country also experienced a serious subsistence crisis which left it vulnerable to contagion. K. H. Connell estimates that as many as one million people contracted typhus during the years 1816-19 and that up to 65,000 may have died.Footnote 14 The prospect of a royal visit and the benefits that might accrue generated a heightened level of excitement that received expression in an unprecedented outpouring of loyalty. Coming so close after the coronation, the royal visit was portrayed as the king bestowing a special favour on his Irish subjects. ‘No king that ever reigned has rendered such a service as this to Ireland’ reported the pro-administration Dublin Evening Post, ‘he was the first king that ever visited Ireland in the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious peace’.Footnote 15
The attraction of a royal favour notwithstanding, the fact that Ireland had not experienced a royal visit in peacetime was a source of unease in Dublin Castle. Many people were probably unaware that the king was widely regarded in England as ‘a morally worthless individual’ whose ‘self-indulgent vulgarity’ was unequalled since the 1688 revolution.Footnote 16 There was widespread awareness, however, of his divorce proceedings against Queen Caroline and this resulted in support for her in Ireland. However, that sympathy had begun to wane, and although Daniel O'Connell had sought to exploit the estrangement of the newly crowned George IV and his queen to have himself appointed as attorney general, he supported a call in December 1820 to vote a loyal address to George IV and praise his actions in putting Queen Caroline on trial for adultery.Footnote 17 The administration was unsure, therefore, how the king would be received. Anxious to minimise the potential for disquiet, Dublin Castle prepared a set of directions for the public and Lord Castlereagh informed his wife that ‘Paddy would be well drilled to let his majesty go peaceably to the Park’.Footnote 18 Lord Bloomfield, who arrived in Dublin in advance of the royal party, was charged with persuading those who might be disaffected to participate in the public entertainments arranged in the king's honour.Footnote 19 And, as a further precaution, it was decided that ‘low political jobbers and intriguers’ were to be kept well away from the king.Footnote 20
As part of this effort to pre-empt trouble during the royal visit, a public ‘letter’, which may have originated in Dublin Castle, was issued in which the Irish people were assured that the king ‘comes with the olive branch, the harbinger of peace’, and they were urged to reciprocate with feelings of kindness, the implication being that they might thereby ‘achieve great benefits’ for the country. They were encouraged to ‘hail the coming of [the] king, [as] … all is promise and hope and joy’, and they were warned that any act of imprudence or any display of disloyal feeling would extinguish hopes of prosperity and would retard the interests of their country.Footnote 21 Moreover, they were instructed to ‘receive George the Fourth as the Roman peoples did Aurelian’ if they wished to achieve lasting benefits from the visit. Catholics were urged to desist from compiling a list of grievances with which to reproach the king, and instead, to show ‘real and spontaneous expressions of loyalty … and give the monarch a kingly welcome’. Insisting that the king was coming in a spirit of conciliation, they were warned that their ‘future hopes [were] balanced upon a pivot where a vacillation to either side may realise or destroy them’. The leaders of the people were advised to use their influence to prevent ‘unprofitable and mischievous discussion’, and the Irish were exhorted to lay aside bigotries and to receive the royal visit as the ‘undivided people of Ireland’.Footnote 22
After years of fruitless political effort, hopes of a removal of Catholic disabilities were high in early 1821. On 17 April, however, the Roman Catholic Disability Removal Bill was defeated in the House of Lords and, as a consequence, John Scott, Lord Eldon, the leading opponent of Catholic relief, assumed that there would be ‘no Irish expedition’ that year.Footnote 23 Undeterred, Sir Henry Parnell, believing that the king was well disposed to the Catholic bill, remained optimistic that a breakthrough was in sight, and insisted that everything should be done to canvass the king's support.Footnote 24 In fact, as James Loughlin has noted, Parnell misread the king's attitude towards emancipation.Footnote 25 George IV was implacably opposed to removing Catholic disabilities. When the royal visit was eventually confirmed, Parnell encouraged Catholic leaders to seize the opportunity and to prepare ‘numerous addresses alluding delicately’ to the king's favourable sentiments towards the bill. The O'Conor Don urged Daniel O'Connell to ‘do everything possible to gain his majesty's support’, and O'Connell saw the advantage of combining Catholic and Protestant liberal loyalty to produce a coalition that would overwhelm Protestant opposition to emancipation.Footnote 26 At a meeting in Dublin on 9 July, a proposal was moved by Eneas McDonnell and seconded by O'Connell inviting all Irishmen, irrespective of class or creed, to join together to welcome the king ‘with one unanimous Irish welcome and congratulation’.Footnote 27
Simultaneously, those agitating for Catholic emancipation were informed that it was inexpedient to connect the general question of Catholic affairs to any congratulatory address to the king. Instead, Parnell indicated that it would be ‘of the greatest advantage to the cause if the Catholics take advantage of the opportunity’ of the royal visit to gratify ‘the feelings of the king’, and he cautioned against making claims or mentioning disabilities.Footnote 28 The Catholic bishops responded accordingly. Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin was asked to draft an address to George IV on behalf of the Catholic hierarchy. His first draft was forthright and direct, and ‘expounded on the plight of the unemancipated Catholics in “a world which rejects them and treats them as outcasts”’.Footnote 29 The draft was deemed too blunt and it was determined instead that the hierarchy's address should be one of ‘hearty welcome’ with gushing effusions of loyalty. Bishop Doyle anticipated that ‘expressions of loyalty and attachment’ would be forthcoming from the majority of Catholics although he believed that it would be ‘more difficult to silence those violent Catholics’ who were of the opinion that they had ‘nothing to hope for’ from the royal visit.Footnote 30
Conceiving that it was in their interest to present Catholics as law-abiding, Catholic leaders reminded their followers of their ‘duty of loyalty’.Footnote 31 As further proof of this loyalty, O'Connell proposed that an anniversary dinner be held annually on the king's birthday.Footnote 32 The impending royal visit was regarded as ‘a prelude of hope – a delightful harbinger of accord’ and it was agreed that it would raise the ‘hopes and the tone of the Irish Catholics’.Footnote 33 The elevation of nine Irishmen to the peerage in the coronation honours served to heighten the sense of expectation.Footnote 34 Newspapers reported that there was a general sense of an ‘altered feeling and improved tone’ towards Catholics and that the time was auspicious.Footnote 35 There seemed to be an expectation that some form of emancipation must soon follow. One observer noted wryly that ‘they say they love conciliation, because they want emancipation; they wish the king to be apprised, that they deserve to be franchised’.Footnote 36
After years of economic depression there was hope also of an economic upsurge following the announcement of the royal visit. The Dublin Evening Post informed readers that the city would benefit financially from the visit and that the presence of the king's court for a month ‘would be of great service to every man residing in the city and engaged in mercantile or trading pursuits’.Footnote 37 In one of the many verses written for the occasion, a poet pronounced optimistically:
The prospect of financial gain was foremost in the mind of another poet who observed rather cynically that ‘we are prepared to receive the great man for whom nobody cared, till we heard he intended to scatter his money in Dublin to render us joyous and funny’.Footnote 39
Dubliners were encouraged into ‘an unparalleled display of splendour and festivity’ with proud and patriotic demonstrations of Irish manufacture and arts.Footnote 40 The social season was extended in the city with additional performances in the Theatre Royal due to popular demand.Footnote 41 Merchants of fine foods and wines ordered extra supplies for ‘noblemen and gentlemen intending to entertain such of their English friends as may accompany his majesty’.Footnote 42 Tailors assured their clienteles that they would be able to meet the demand for court dresses, and military and naval uniforms. A new fabric was created incorporating the three national emblems of shamrock, thistle and oakleaf from which dresses could be made for the grand national ceremony of the installation of the Knights of St Patrick.Footnote 43 Others were advised that ‘his majesty's visit to Pat’ would ‘twice fill your pockets with money’ and the experience of those with suitable properties to rent seemed to bear this out.Footnote 44 Rents increased hugely in Dublin and furnished houses and lodgings were difficult to procure. The house of the Latouche family in Merrion Square was taken over by the Spanish ambassador for the duration of the royal visit.Footnote 45 Charlemont House in Rutland Square was rented by Prince Esterhazy, the Austrian ambassador.Footnote 46
Shops and businesses contributed to the heightened mood by displaying colourful illuminations and full-length portraits of the king in his coronation robes. Others portrayed the city keys being laid at the monarch's feet. Buildings were decorated with lanterns and flags, and several were surmounted by the imperial crown outlined in lamps or candles.Footnote 47 The poet, James Scott, observed that
There are flowers in every window and garlands round each door
And whiten'd is the poor man's wall, and sanded is his floor.Footnote 48
A carver and gilder from Dame Street sought permission to obtain a quantity of gold from a mine in County Wicklow to create commemorative medallions, rich in imagery and symbolism. The Dublin Fishery Company offered its fast-sailing cutters for rent to the public to allow them to sail out to meet the king's yacht, while wherries were made available to sail between Howth and Holyhead to meet the royal fleet.Footnote 49
In late July, at a meeting of the committee specially convened to conduct the public festivities in honour of his majesty, it was agreed that a lasting testimonial should be erected to mark the visit and that the king would lay the first stone during his visit.Footnote 50 Meanwhile, the Royal Irish Institution offered a sum of £500 for the best picture by an Irish artist depicting the king's arrival.Footnote 51 In the city itself a large circular room was added to the Mansion House for the reception of his majesty.Footnote 52 An arch was set up at the junction of Cavendish Row, Great Britain (now Parnell) Street and Sackville (now O'Connell) Street. Christ Church Cathedral underwent a thorough repair in preparation. All the public expenses were met by the Dublin administration.Footnote 53 Cartloads of gravel were brought in to surface the roads on which the royal carriage would travel.Footnote 54 So enthusiastic was the mood that there were calls to collect funds to construct a palace in order that the king might become a regular visitor.Footnote 55
Nor were these preparations confined to Dublin. The city of Kilkenny hosted a brilliant illumination, and, while Ulster loyalists ‘remained emotionally untouched’ by the visit, bonfires burned in Banbridge and at Shane's Castle near Randalstown in Antrim.Footnote 56 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, illuminations, bonfires and decoration were customary modes of celebrating major public events. As Padhraig Higgins has observed, parades, illuminations, bonfires, transparencies and decorating buildings ‘all communicated political meanings just as surely as the patriotic press’.Footnote 57 For Irish Protestants, commemorating historical anniversaries and major occasions in the lives of the royal family was an important demonstration of ideological identity. James Kelly has outlined how, throughout the eighteenth century, commemorative patterns helped to affirm devotion to the crown and to the British connection.Footnote 58 However, with Williamite celebrations in College Green becoming increasingly violent in the period leading up to the royal visit in 1821 as ultra-Protestants celebrated the victory at the Battle of the Boyne or William III's birthday, it is unsurprising that Dublin Castle was concerned about the prospect of crowds on the streets during the royal visit.Footnote 59 The visit was especially significant for Dublin because it provided the city's citizens, whether they were loyalists or disinterested observers, with an opportunity to display their city to the rest of the kingdom. Many citizens were determined to make the most of the occasion. Coupled with this was a curiosity about royalty and royal pageantry. Dublin had not been exposed to royal ritual and ceremonial on this scale before. London, by contrast, was so familiar with royal rituals that they did not generate large-scale public displays of loyalism. In fact, David Cannadine argues that the ‘majority of the great royal pageants staged during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century [in London] oscillated between farce and fiasco’.Footnote 60 However, for those Irish people who intended to come out and see the king for themselves, the prospect was novel and exciting.
II
King George IV was expected in Ireland on the second weekend of August 1821. Although the arrival was intended to be private with no official trappings, a sizeable crowd gathered in Howth harbour when, on the afternoon of Sunday 12 August, the king's ship was seen approaching. The king and his party spent the voyage ‘eating goose-pie and drinking whiskey’, and ‘were in the last stages of intoxication’.Footnote 61 As the cheering started, the king, dressed in ‘a long blue coat, blue trousers and half boots, black silk handkerchief round his neck, a seal-skin travelling cap with a broad gold band and white silk gloves’, bowed to the crowd before disembarking and making his way to the Phoenix Park.Footnote 62 George IV remained in private for a few days following the news of the death of Queen Caroline and made his formal entry into Dublin city on Friday, 17 August. At Dublin Castle, he was met by a procession representing the nobility, gentry, country gentlemen, parishes and trades. On Saturday, at the Fifteen Acres, the king reviewed the regiments comprising the garrison in the Phoenix Park. The following day, the royal party attended services at Christ Church Cathedral. During the next week there were levees and evening drawing rooms at the castle, a visit to the theatre, and on Thursday 23 August, the king was guest of honour at a civic banquet held by Dublin Corporation in the newly constructed Round Room at the Mansion House. At the end of the first week the royal party drove through the city and visited the Dublin Society before departing to Slane for the weekend where Lord Castlereagh observed that the king's passion for the castle was ‘equal to that for the proprietress’, Lady Conyngham, his majesty's mistress at that time.Footnote 63 When George IV returned to Dublin he dined at Trinity College and visited the Linen Hall. Later that week he presided over the investiture of knights of the Order of St Patrick and a grand ball at Dublin Castle. His itinerary also included a visit to the Curragh races and to Powerscourt House. The king departed from Dunleary (renamed Kingstown in his honour) on Monday 3 September to the ‘cheers and prayers and blessings of many hundreds and thousands of his faithful Irish subjects’.Footnote 64
This first royal visit in over 130 years was widely reported as an unqualified success. It defied all expectation, puzzling commentators and onlookers in terms of the excessive outpouring of enthusiasm and fervour. Lord Castlereagh recorded that the visit ‘beat the coronation … in crowd and in enthusiasm of the people’.Footnote 65 As the king proceeded through Dublin, observers noted that they had never seen such a manifestation of popular enthusiasm; he was hailed with ‘loud and incessant acclamations’ by hundreds of thousands of people of all ranks.Footnote 66 John Wilson Croker remarked that the Irish did not seem to know ‘how to hurrah or cheer; they have not had much practice in the expression of public joy’.Footnote 67 The Belfast News Letter reported that ‘every individual seemed to vie with his neighbour in showing respect for the occasion’.Footnote 68
By the early 1820s, newspapers had begun to play a central role in moulding public opinion.Footnote 69 As a consequence, the press was heavily politicised and many of the popular journals encouraged a positive reception for the king. In fact, newspaper coverage of the royal visit was so extensive that as well as informing those who could not attend in person, it allowed readers who had witnessed the events to re-experience or relive them through the steady stream of lengthy reports that appeared daily. Newspapers interpreted every symbol and ritual, and their wider significance was explained and analysed in a particular way and for a specific audience which was encouraged to hail the royal visit as ‘a memorable epoch in the recollection of her people’.Footnote 70 In the case of the Belfast News Letter, small vignettes were reported on in great detail in an effort to help the public relate to the royal personage.Footnote 71
By the end of the first week, the fervour was so intense, not only in Dublin, but throughout the country, it was reported that ‘the enthusiastic feeling of gratitude, admiration and attachment for our most beloved and gracious sovereign, King George, has so animated all Ireland with electric rapidity and now … strongly glows in every Irish heart for the happiness conferred on this island by his royal presence’.Footnote 72 It was a widely shared sentiment. Robert Love in Petersburg, Virginia was informed of the ‘most wonderful joy and gladness’ with which the king was received.Footnote 73 Even republicans were supposedly won over. An elderly man who accompanied the king to the viceregal lodge is reported to have said: ‘I was a rebel to ould King George in ’98, and by God, I'd die now a hundred deaths for his son, because he's a rale king, and axes us how we are.’Footnote 74
Sir William Fremantle, treasurer of the king's household, described ‘the conduct of the Irish’ as being ‘beyond all conception of loyalty and adulation’.Footnote 75 It was observed that ‘the Irish appeared to be seized … with a sort of deliration; their heads turned and imaginations possessed with a single idea – the presence of a king’.Footnote 76 Others poured forth ‘gushing effusions of loyalty’, and it was declared that ‘bedlam broke loose would be tame and rational to the madness of this whole nation’.Footnote 77 Even Daniel O'Connell seemed to succumb to the spell that had taken over the people when he spoke of the affection of the ‘humble peasant’ for the king, and he proposed that funds be collected to build a palace which would accommodate his majesty on his future visits.Footnote 78 It was said that even the smallest donation would not be refused so that ‘the poor might share with the rich in demonstrating their feelings’ towards the king.Footnote 79 So excessive did the professions of allegiance become that when the national melody of ‘St Patrick's Day’ was played at the theatre on the occasion of his majesty's visit, the audience hissed and booed and called instead for a repetition of ‘God Save the King’.
The king was even accorded godlike powers. William Wallace, the early biographer of George IV, recorded that his majesty seemed to descend on the Irish ‘like an apparition of superior nature among a provincial people, debased by servitude of caste and country, of lively imaginations, and quick and extreme in their emotions, whether for good or ill’.Footnote 80 James Graham, duke of Montrose, noted that people tried to touch his majesty as if ‘some good would happen to them … from having touched the king or his clothes’.Footnote 81 It was as if a sort of national hysteria had taken root. Valentine Lawless, Lord Cloncurry, who was not an admirer of the administration, admitted that he was not immune to what he identified as a ‘strange madness [that] seemed at that conjuncture to seize people of all ranks … men and women of all classes and opinions joined in a shout of gladness’.Footnote 82 Some of the frenzied reaction can perhaps be explained by the fact that Irish people were encouraged to believe that the king actually cared about them. Pamphlets prepared for the occasion drew on John Dryden's image of kings as fathers, ‘liv[ing] but in their people’.Footnote 83 This idea of fatherly love was extolled in Thomas Travers Burke's poem written to commemorate the royal visit. He referred to the monarch's fatherly love and his quitting of ‘his throne of splendour to prove his children's wants’ while swooping like a guardian angel ‘to heal …. every wound’.Footnote 84 A letter to the Irish nation published in the Freeman's Journal reiterated the idea of the king as the benevolent parent demonstrating affection and solicitude for the happiness and prosperity of his Irish subjects.Footnote 85 One of the many songs composed to commemorate the royal visit was entitled ‘George our Father and King’.Footnote 86 When a man who walked more than 100 miles to see the king was asked why he had undertaken such a journey, he replied that ‘it was a good walk, but I thought nothing of it when I consider how much further His Majesty, long life to him, had come to see me!’Footnote 87 Some individuals took the idea of the king as father literally and there were several petitions from people experiencing huge levels of distress who formed the idea that the king would personally help them. For example, Sarah Monk, a widow from Kilbeggan in County Westmeath with five children, appealed to Dublin Castle for direction on how to petition the king to request assistance for her distressed situation, and Matilda Manoe, a widow resident on North Cumberland Street in Dublin petitioned the king emphasising her distress and requesting relief.Footnote 88
The English pamphleteer and reformer, William Cobbett, further contributed to the idea of the king as benevolent father when he observed that ‘the king gives the weakest and poorest of us some degree of consequence; as his subjects, we are upon a level with the noble and the rich’.Footnote 89 It is easy to see how a people who were living in abject poverty and destitution could, for a few weeks in August 1821, feel elevated to a level of importance, and how such an occasion could bring them out on the streets in such numbers and with such enthusiasm. There was also a sense of expectation of an improvement of their condition. In an address to the inhabitants of Dublin issued in advance of the royal visit, the ‘poor and friendless’ were assured that they would not be forgotten. ‘Never was there such an opportunity presented for improving their condition’, they were promised. ‘We have to boast of some of the most admirable institutions in the world for the relief of misery in all its complicated forms.’Footnote 90
Even the king himself was caught up in the ‘strange madness’. Following his unpopular legal case against the queen, he had become remarkably sensitive to popular ridicule and mockery at home, so much so that his advisers spent thousands of pounds buying up radical caricatures.Footnote 91 By contrast, the welcome he received in Ireland was magnificent and profuse. For a man who was easily susceptible to flattery this was a pleasant respite. Indeed, as soon as he observed the enthusiasm of the Irish welcome, he was unable to restrain himself. Thus, regardless of the fact that he was officially in mourning due to the death of Queen Caroline, he informed his Irish audience immediately following his arrival that ‘this is one of the happiest days of my life. I have long wished to visit you – my heart has always been Irish … this day has shown me that I am beloved by my Irish subjects … to feel that I live in the hearts of my Irish subjects is to me exalted happiness.’Footnote 92 When the crowd shouted ‘God bless you. Ireland loves you’, the king responded ‘and I love Ireland’, and he pointed vigorously to a large shamrock cockade he was wearing.Footnote 93 The king was praised for having chosen to visit Ireland so soon after his coronation and, in return, he promised to ‘promote, to the utmost of [his] power, its welfare, prosperity and happiness’.Footnote 94
Indeed, the king was so caught up in the enthusiasm and the passion of the occasion that he confessed that ‘he never felt himself so perfectly a king as since he came to this country’.Footnote 95 He informed an adoring crowd that his heart had ‘always been Irish: from the day it first beat I have loved Ireland’.Footnote 96 When Henry Addington, Lord Sidmouth, his chief confidential adviser, expressed wonder at the loyalty of a recently rebellious people, the king is reported to have replied: ‘No, not at all! Their former character must have been caused by misrule.’Footnote 97 Such was the fervour and the excitement that seasoned courtiers like the duke of Montrose and Lord Sidmouth remained close in case his majesty should make some rash promise and create ‘grounds of expectation and hope which can hardly be realised’.Footnote 98 Fremantle observed that the conduct of the Irish was beyond all conception of adulation and loyalty, and he feared that it would only serve to ‘strengthen those feelings of self-will and personal authority which are at all times uppermost in The Mind’ of the king.Footnote 99
The manner in which the Irish crowds conducted themselves during the visit was a surprise to many in England and on the continent. John Hall informed his brother Sam in America that ‘Ireland is an altered country … there is no frolicking of any kind whatever’.Footnote 100 The duke of Montrose observed that ‘they hardly know the people under the restraint and manner which they have imposed on themselves since the residence of his majesty among them … they had a quietness and a desire to conduct themselves with propriety I never saw before’.Footnote 101 French newspapers expressed astonishment. One reported that ‘Il est impossible pour les froids et méthodiques anglais de se faire une idée de la vivacité et la chaleur avec lesquelles le people irlandais a exprimé ses sentiments.’Footnote 102 Meanwhile, British newspapers reported on the king's amazing popularity in Dublin and declared that Ireland had ‘set an example which [Britain] should do well to copy’.Footnote 103 Sir Robert Peel was informed that the visit had, for the moment, ‘assuaged the violence and for some time removed the rancour of party’.Footnote 104 Others, however, were suspicious and asked ‘what the Irish propose … by these new loyal vagaries’.Footnote 105 The arch-opponent of Catholic relief, Lord Eldon, was uneasy; he admitted to his brother that he did not understand what ‘all the occurrences in Ireland mean as to the Catholic question’.Footnote 106
When confronted with the crowds lining the streets as the royal party progressed through Dublin and its environs, an English commentator observed of the crowds that ‘their loyalty runs … mountains high … his majesty must be deeply penetrated with the lively demonstrations of it that pour in upon him from all quarters’.Footnote 107 There is no doubt that a combination of loyalty and curiosity brought many out onto the streets, and Saunders's News-Letter reported that ‘never in any age or country was a sovereign received, among his people with such decided and spontaneous demonstrations of joy and exultation’.Footnote 108 It was, of course, in the interest of the administration in Dublin Castle and of the editors of loyalist newspapers to interpret the general expressions of celebration as monarchism. It was their hope that it set a precedent for the king's visits to Scotland and Hanover which were planned to follow immediately after his Irish visit, and their monarchism could not be assumed. As Mark Harrison has noted, the presence of crowds is used to ‘proclaim the existence of certain views and values. When thousands of people present themselves on the street their individual value systems are reduced, condensed, filtered and reinterpreted by those who comment on them.’Footnote 109 In the case of those who gathered to witness the king's visit, it was not necessarily monarchism that brought them onto the streets.
There was already a long tradition of public gathering in Ireland by 1821. Padhraig Higgins and Allan Blackstock have highlighted the fact that Irish patriot culture offered opportunities for the assertion of Protestantism in its public commemoration of King William III's birthday and the Battle of the Boyne thus providing an exemplar for loyalist response to royal visits in the nineteenth century.Footnote 110 Higgins has also explored the process of popular politicisation in Ireland in the late-eighteenth century alongside what Tim Harris has termed ‘the politics of the excluded’.Footnote 111 Daniel O'Connell had appealed to this sentiment in his annual address to the Catholics of Ireland in January 1821 when, having invoked the wrongs being done to them, he encouraged them to struggle for the ‘natural and inherent rights of our now wretched country’.Footnote 112 By demanding that they begin to take responsibility for achieving their own freedoms, he was attempting to mobilise the ‘demoralised and defeated Catholics’ as he contrived to kickstart his own campaign for emancipation.Footnote 113 Thus, it is not surprising that crowds formed to witness the royal visit in the summer of 1821, and for a variety of reasons.
III
The frenzied behaviour of the Irish crowds was not universally acclaimed. Some, embarrassed by the servile, fawning nature of the public reception, expressed their shame at the ‘fever of loyalty’ that was displayed.Footnote 114 It was even observed that ‘common sense was sick with bother’ and that the public presses teemed with ‘disgusting balderdash and slavish blarney’.Footnote 115 ‘They clawed and pawed him all over’, observed Emily, countess of Glengall.Footnote 116 Some Irishmen branded their fellow countrymen ‘crouching sycophants [with] fawning tongues, hailing the vile authors of our matchless wrongs’.Footnote 117 Moreover, this sentiment was not confined to Ireland. Lord Byron contemptuously described the visit in his poem, ‘The Irish avatar’, styling the king as ‘the messiah of royalty’ and the Irish reception of him as ‘servile devotion’.Footnote 118 On the continent, the general consensus was that that the king had acted with good sense while ‘poor Paddy’ had received him in a ‘bad servile style’.Footnote 119 Others criticised the Irish for not raising the abject poverty and misery to which they were subject and the almost insurmountable problems they faced. ‘No lamentation of grievance, no petition for redress was heard during the whole of the royal visit’, Robert Huish observed.Footnote 120 Instead, ‘cold and hunger seemed to sing a welcome to their Irish king’.Footnote 121 The Irish were criticised for their inconsistency and for their cringing, fawning and flattering of the king. Six months previously they had supported the queen and now they ‘praise the very chains that clog them, and lick the very hand that flogs them’.Footnote 122 The same writer noted rather contemptuously that
In fact, even as the king was making his public entry into Dublin and as many of the great public functions were taking place, the remains of the late queen were being removed in London. Robert Huish, an early biographer of George IV, who set the tone for the contemporary view of the king as ‘a dissolute, pleasure-loving dilettante and a feeble ineffective monarch’, claimed that the king was ‘gracefully lolling in his carriage, bloated and puffed up with the incense which a rabble crowd were strewing around him’.Footnote 124 He should, Huish thought, have shown by example that ‘a good monarch and a good man are inseparable characters’ and, instead of ‘revelling in pleasure and dissipation’ in Dublin, he should have observed some element of respect.Footnote 125 These criticisms were compounded as the royal tour moved towards its close. There were unmistakeable signs that the king's enthusiasm began to wane, and that he grew increasingly bored with Ireland. On Friday, 24 August he left a reception at the Dublin Society after five minutes and, on the following day, Lord Sidmouth insisted that the Irish visit should not be further protracted as he observed a ‘deep-rooted dissatisfaction which is continually showing itself, and which places us all in a painful and irksome situation’.Footnote 126 On Monday night, 27 August, John Wilson Croker expressed the opinion that the king left a grand dinner at Trinity College too early.Footnote 127
Perhaps the visit could never have satisfied the expectations that were entertained in many quarters of its effect. For the people who lined the processional routes, the ‘mere presence of the king possessed in itself no talismanic power to stifle the complaints of the Irish people’.Footnote 128 On the king's part, his love of show and ostentation, and his reaction to flattery and adulation appeared to govern his actions. He did not apply himself to learning about the actual state of the population and had no interest in getting to know the public or the country. As one contemporary commentator wryly observed, his majesty encountered the Irish in their ‘holiday clothes not in their every-day suits’.Footnote 129 This was not due to lack of effort to make the king aware of the situation of the poor and Robert Huish was incorrect when he stated that no petitions for redress were heard for the duration of the royal visit. As soon as the royal visit was announced, hundreds of attempts were made to petition the king and to inform him of the reality of life in Ireland, but these appeals and entreaties never reached his majesty. Among the hundreds of pieces of correspondence sent to Dublin Castle there is one from a poet from Sligo who wrote to the chief secretary requesting that he present a petition and a poem to the king which included the lines: ‘Coffins for the dead us poor can't now afford … on dry potatoes wives and children dine.’Footnote 130 There were, in addition, the numerous pleas for assistance from families who were in severe distress and on the verge of starvation. Jeremiah Long of Tarbert in Kerry wrote directly to the king informing him that he was ‘on the very brink of ruin’.Footnote 131 Widows of soldiers petitioned for financial aid. Victims of outrages begged for help.Footnote 132
There was an awareness too that the country could ill-afford the lavish expenditure required to entertain a royal guest at that time. ‘Were you there you would imagine Ireland to be the richest country in the world, such exertions have these poor people made to testify their attachment to George the Fourth’, General Barnard wrote to his sister-in-law.Footnote 133 The countess of Glengall observed sagely that ‘far from doing good to this wretched country, his visit is making people spend money which they don't possess’.Footnote 134 The reality was that the illuminations, the parades, the grand dinners and balls and the large turnouts were only for show. ‘To see the shows was very nice, but then it costs so great a price’, observed one anonymous chronicler.Footnote 135 It was reported that many people provided themselves with new clothes for the royal visit that they could not afford. As the king rode in procession through Dublin, the weavers of the city turned out in considerable numbers in new silk vests to see him. However, each paid £3 15s. for the clothes, which was deducted from their wages.Footnote 136 Wherever the king went, onlookers contrived to show themselves off in their best attire. While attending the Curragh races, George IV commented on how well turned-out the course-keepers were, only to be informed that the clothes were all new. This behaviour sat uneasily with the fact that the area of Dublin occupied by many of the clothing manufacturers was in a squalid state and that typhus was rampant there. Of the £1,400 donated by the king to the charities of Dublin, only £100 went to the Liberties.Footnote 137 Dublin Corporation too was deeply in debt and the costs associated with welcoming a royal personage to Dublin only made matters worse. The addition of the Round Room to the Mansion House cost almost £8,000 alone.Footnote 138 Some individuals who lost money on the royal events later sought compensation. John Kellet erected four large stages on Kevin Street and Bishop Street to permit spectators a view of the king's arrival for the installation ceremony of the Knights of St Patrick. However, owing to unfavourable weather on the day, the stands were unoccupied and he lost a great deal of money.Footnote 139
In many ways people were willing participants in the whole drama. Shrewd observers pointed out that ‘the royal visit was the most successful bait ever held out to a vain people; the spell operated to its full extent, and each endeavoured to honour himself, under the pretence of honouring the king’.Footnote 140 The duke of Montrose concurred: he observed that ‘expectation of further advantage has … great influence on their feelings and conduct’.Footnote 141 As a result, the adulation, the feasting and the profligate expenditure was persisted in right up to the end of the royal visit. Entertainments at Dublin Castle and the private meals presented for the king at Phoenix Lodge were sumptuous in the extreme.Footnote 142
There were those who felt that the king's visit to Ireland at such a time was ill-advised. They pointed out the obvious, that making Dublin a scene of exhilaration and expense would not lessen ‘the odious burden of tithes … soften the rigour and severity of the revenue laws … diffuse the blessings of education … raise the wages of labour’ and that until the Irish were enabled to enjoy the comforts of a civilised life, ‘Ireland must remain … a poor, miserable and distracted country’.Footnote 143 One contemporary anticipated that ‘his majesty's late journey to see his kingdom of Ireland … will not on the whole redound much to his honour or advantage’.Footnote 144 Having heard about the expenditure involved in entertaining the king, and of some of George's more indiscreet remarks and actions during the visit, John Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, the former lord chancellor of Ireland, described the visit as ‘that unfortunate journey’ and the king's behaviour as ‘imprudent’.Footnote 145
IV
By the end of the visit, the king was eager to depart and he graced the crowd with a few patronising words. ‘Whenever an opportunity offers wherein I can serve Ireland, I shall seize on it with eagerness’, he informed the crowd who had gathered to see him off at the newly-named Kingstown harbour.Footnote 146 In an attempt to take something positive from the visit, some interpreted the king's words as being partial towards emancipation, so much so that it was immediately reported that the ‘Catholics … are quite triumphant and sure of their emancipation’.Footnote 147 They were mistaken, however, and the king's failure to respond to O'Connell's presentation of a laurel crown at Kingstown harbour was a clear indication of his unwillingness to make any positive move towards the cause for emancipation.Footnote 148
On his departure from Ireland, the king issued a letter through the lord lieutenant in which he expressed his approbation of the welcome he had received. ‘The dutiful and affectionate attachment’ of the Irish people, he declared, ‘had made the deepest impression on his mind.’ He exhorted the people to maintain the spirit of ‘loyal union’ that he had encountered, and he encouraged them to avoid ‘every cause of irritation’ and to cultivate ‘mutual forbearance and goodwill’.Footnote 149 While some regarded the king's letter as ‘a puny equivocating exhortation to concord’, Daniel O'Connell declared the letter gratifying and hopeful, and pronounced that ‘too much publicity could not be given to a document so honourable to the sovereign’.Footnote 150 Sir Walter Scott confessed to Maria Edgeworth that ‘if there was no better result to the king's journey than that temporary union of feelings and interests it cannot have been made in vain’.Footnote 151 The editor of the Freeman's Journal declared that the letter should be made available in the ‘dwelling of every man in Ireland, from the peer to the peasant’, and a group of Dublin Catholics agreed to raise a subscription to ensure that the document circulated without delay to every part of Ireland.Footnote 152 The letter was translated into Irish and was read from the altars at Mass by Catholic priests and used as a reading lesson in Catholic schools.Footnote 153
However, as one of George IV's early biographers observed of his Irish visit, ‘the greatest expectations were entertained on both sides … but they were fatally disappointed’.Footnote 154 Within a short time of the king's departure, feelings of disenchantment and disgust emerged on one side at the unfulfilled hopes which were mirrored on the other by a sense that his majesty's graciousness had been ill-appreciated. On the king's part, within a few days of his leave-taking at Kingstown, he discovered that he was ‘not so much enraptured with Ireland’ and, ‘alarmed at the advances and favour he had shown to the Catholics’, he declared his steadfast resolution not to accede to the Catholic claims.Footnote 155 This backward step was reciprocated in Ireland where ‘the noise of the shout of welcome had … scarcely ceased to sound in men's ears when matters fell back into their former state’.Footnote 156 The absentee lords and ladies who had left their English homes to swell the king's procession in Dublin quickly left the city to return to England and, an observer noted, the ‘spacious streets of the Irish metropolis resumed their wonted aspect of solitude and desolation’.Footnote 157 Catholics soon realised that their hopes of emancipation were stymied and, as Alvin Jackson has observed, that George's coronation tour with its ‘shamrockery and tartanry … [had] served only to raise popular expectations rather than address them’.Footnote 158 As far as they were concerned, the king's visit seemed an artifice and Lord Sidmouth's parting epistle meant nothing. O'Connell, who had been swept away like everyone else in the emotion and hysteria of the royal visit, later described the king to his private secretary as ‘a most hideous object … [who had] come to Ireland to humbug the Catholics’.Footnote 159
V
Many Catholics and Protestants laid aside their differences for the duration of George IV's visit and sought to act on the instructions of the Dublin Castle administration that they present to the king a ‘united people … he will be convinced that, notwithstanding all our disagreements, we Christians love one another’.Footnote 160 Few entertained any doubts that those differences would flare up again once the king had departed. Many Orangemen regarded the king's visit as a disaster. Colonel William Blacker, one of the original members of the Orange institution, resented ‘the pandering to popish party feeling’ evinced by the homage paid to the king by the Catholic hierarchy and by O'Connell.Footnote 161 While his majesty had urged conciliation, Shunsuke Katsuta points out this conciliation was less about improving the general relationship between Catholics and Protestants than about curbing the influence of the Orange Order by stopping Williamite ceremonies and toasts.Footnote 162 Indeed, in an act which seemed ‘calculated to revive those feuds and animosities’, members of the Wexford grand jury toasted the ‘glorious and immortal memory of King William’ within days of the king's departure.Footnote 163 As Sir Thomas Charles Morgan discerningly observed soon afterwards, ‘the sudden peace concluded between the Orangemen and the Catholics in order to afford the king the semblance of a united nation is one of the strangest instances of political feebleness which modern times has witnessed’.Footnote 164
Soon after the king's departure, a series of events that set the stage for an extended period of agrarian unrest began in the south-west and soon spread across Munster. By October 1821, it was reported that ‘Ireland is … in a worse state than ever; and unless vigorous measures are soon adopted there, no authority will remain in the country’.Footnote 165 Letters flooded into the chief secretary's office telling of outrages, murders and assassinations being committed in many parts of the country. Troops were dispatched into disturbed areas and a request was made to London for additional military support.Footnote 166 In late November 1821, Sir Edward O'Brien of Dromoland Castle warned Charles Grant, the chief secretary, that the country was in ‘great distress’ and the ‘ignorant, misguided and desperate population … had everything to fear and not a ray of hope to brighten the prospect’, and that ‘poverty, famine and distress of every kind [was] staring them in the face’.Footnote 167 Such was the miserable state of people in some parts of the country that it was even suggested that the large sum of money which had been donated to build a palace to accommodate the king's future visits would be better spent in giving employment to those who were starving.Footnote 168
By December, the country was in such a state that the government replaced Charles, Earl Talbot, as lord lieutenant with Richard, Lord Wellesley, in the hope of conciliating both Catholics and Protestants. Lord Sidmouth, who had witnessed the reception of the king first-hand in August, admitted that ‘it is most affecting to compare Ireland as it now appears with its appearance in the month of August. Not that the seeds which have since put forth did not then exist; not that they could be deadened by the royal visit, but still the contrast to the eye and observation to the world is most painful and humiliating. We who witnessed and partook in the exaltation of the summer must deeply feel the abominations and disgrace of the winter.’Footnote 169
As the winter progressed, the marquess of Buckingham was informed in January 1822 that ‘there are considerable apprehensions in Ireland of distress from the utter failure of the potatoes which are all rotten, and of the turves which they were prevented by the wet from cutting’.Footnote 170 The situation continued to deteriorate and it was observed in February that ‘Ireland … goes from bad to worse’.Footnote 171 The select committee appointed to report on the condition of the labouring poor noted that the famine of early 1822 ‘proceeded less from the want of food itself than from the want of adequate means of purchasing it’, and that the condition of the peasantry in many districts was ‘wretched and calamitous to the greatest degree’.Footnote 172 A Scottish agriculturalist who visited Ireland at this time recorded that ‘a large portion of the peasantry live in a state of misery of which he could have formed no conception, not imagining that any human beings could exist in such wretchedness’.Footnote 173
VI
The visit of George IV to Ireland during the summer of 1821 played out like a well-rehearsed drama. The king played his part, flattered his Irish subjects and went through the royal ritual. The people who lined the streets to see the king played the part of a loyal populace who loved their sovereign and overlooked the wretchedness and despair of their everyday reality. It was all an image and a fantasy and is, perhaps, best summed up by K. Theodore Hoppen who described the visit as a ‘Ruritanian farce’, and an ‘isolated flamboyant gesture’ on behalf of the king.Footnote 174 Interestingly, some British newspapers were more perceptive, or perhaps more honest, in their observations on the episode than the Irish newspapers when they reported on the harsh realities of everyday life for the vast majority of Irish people who flocked to see the king.Footnote 175 While they were at a loss to explain the fervour, they were united in the opinion that if the royal visit resulted in ‘lasting benefit to Ireland – if the finest art of the British dominions shall cease to be the most miserable country in Europe’, then the visit would, in some measure, be a success.Footnote 176
However, George IV's visit did not bring any lasting benefit. Although the royal tour of 1821 is often referred to as a great success, it was not. As soon as the king's ship sailed out of sight of Kingstown on 3 September, the crowds of onlookers returned to their ordinary lives of poverty and destitution. As the poet, writing under the pseudonym Human Reason, observed:
He concluded that nothing had been gained for the ‘naked, hungry, slaving wretches’.Footnote 177 While it would be foolish to suggest that a twenty-three-day visit by a king could effect a magical transformation to a country where a significant proportion of the population were annually in a state of extreme privation and regularly experienced food shortages, the visit had the potential to bring about lasting improvements and developments if the king and his advisors had taken the opportunity to look beyond the pageantry and learn about the actual state of the country. Of course, this would only have been possible if those who crowded onto the streets had not been swept up in the excitement and the emotion of the occasion. Instead, ‘the king's visit to Ireland appeared like a blink of sunshine on the island, but its dubious splendour was only the precursor of the storm’.Footnote 178
