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<\/a>I confess, I love British royal dramas. I\u2019ve seen scads of Tudor stuff, and I\u2019ve watched all the episodes so far of PBS\u2019 Victoria<\/em>, but I have to shut off parts of my brain to do it \u2014 the parts that are Irish and Catholic. But the next episode turns them back on.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll leave Henry VIII and Elizabeth I for another time (but you can click here<\/a> to see what I had to say about the portrayal of Katherine of Aragon on Showtime\u2019s The Tudors<\/em>).<\/p>\n As for Victoria<\/em><\/a>, currently airing season three Sunday nights on PBS\u2019 Masterpiece<\/em> (check local listings), I\u2019ll give the show credit for not shying away completely from the issues the British crown had (has) with the Irish, Catholics and, at the tip of that spear, Irish Catholics.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s entirely up front about them, either.<\/p>\n In the episode airing on most PBS channels<\/a> on Sunday, Feb. 10 (check local listings), Victoria,\u00a0 wearing a dress ironically embroidered with shamrocks (widely associated with Catholic St. Patrick), visits Ireland \u2014 just after the worst of the recent famine is over.<\/p>\n Credit goes to series creator and writer Daisy Goodwin for a season-two episode that focused on the staggering holocaust that was the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s. Amazingly, British press at the time said that many viewers in the U.K. were unaware of what had happened just across the Irish Sea.<\/p>\n From IrishCentral.com<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n British viewers were truly shocked to discover the brutality of the Great Hunger. Many of them had not previously known of the death of at least one million and emigration of a further million of their closest neighbors in what must be regarded as the darkest and most horrifying seven years in Irish history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Looks like British history education is about as good as much of ours.<\/p>\n Forced to be tenant farmers on their own land \u2014 with large swaths in the hands of British or British-supported aristocracy \u2014 many Irish gave over everything they grew to pay the rent. Much of this food was exported to England, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey and beef. As for the farmers and their families, they ate potatoes, which grew well on the bits of ground they had to feed themselves.<\/p>\n When the blight hit, and the potato crop failed, a million died from disease and starvation (sometimes reduced to cannibalism or eating grass) and a million emigrated (which I suppose was welcome news to British overlords, who then had more land for grazing and fewer troublesome Irish).<\/p>\n The British famine-relief effort was, to use the mildest possible term, inadequate. The harshest assessment is many of the powerful in Britain saw it as opportunity \u2014 and it was the fault of the profligate, over-breeding Irish Catholics, anyway.<\/p>\n Click here<\/a> for a link to the Irish Famine Museum.<\/p>\n A season-two episode of Victoria<\/em>, called Skibbereen<\/em>, dealt with this, through the eyes of one of Goodwin\u2019s ancestors, Church of Ireland (that\u2019s the Crown-approved Irish Protestant church) minister Robert Traill<\/a> \u2014 who had the unheard-of notion that he should try to feed all those in his geographic parish, whether Protestant or Catholic.<\/p>\n The episode also shows Victoria as being deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Irish, and even nice to an Irish-Catholic servant.<\/p>\n From a review in the U.K. Telegraph<\/em><\/a>, which takes a dissenting view:<\/p>\n It was inevitable that the question of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s would present something of a knotty problem for\u00a0Victoria\u00a0<\/a>(ITV). The series\u2019 efforts to promote the young monarch (Jenna Coleman) as woman of supremely, often anachronistically, enlightened attitudes on a wide range of social issues was always going to run slap, bang, wallop into the fact that history has left us with very little evidence that she bothered taking any interest at all in the famine. Much less that she cared in any way deeply about the Biblically proportioned catastrophe that was carrying away more than a million of her beloved subjects right on her doorstep.<\/p>\n Thus the fifth episode of\u00a0Victoria\u00a0pretty much had its potato cake and ate it, by painting an imaginative picture of a monarch secretly horrified about a situation that she was well aware of, but hamstrung \u00a0\u2013 and therefore unable to speak out \u2013 by a cynical prime minister, Sir Robert Peel (Nigel Lindsay) who was far more interested in saving votes at home than saving lives in Ireland.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n From IrishCentral.com<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no evidence that she had any real compassion for the Irish people in any way,\u201d said historian Christine Kinealy, founding director of Ireland\u2019s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Kinealy has studied Queen Victoria\u2019s diaries as well as the writings of Prime Ministers Peel and Russell, and she believes that \u201cVictoria\u201d may be overplaying the real queen\u2019s empathy.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that really she had no interest in Ireland and so to imagine she wanted to do more doesn\u2019t really ring true,\u201d Kinealy told IrishCentral.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But, says Goodwin herself to the U.K. RadioTimes<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n In the\u00a0episode about the Irish potato famine<\/a>, I have Victoria meet the Irish clergyman Robert Traill (my great-great-great-grandfather), even though it never happened in real life, because I wanted to show how affected she was by the suffering in Ireland. She has been called the Famine Queen, but in fact Victoria herself gave \u00a32,000 (more like \u00a3150,000 in today\u2019s money), to Irish relief \u2013 it was her government who let the Irish starve, not their Queen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In 1849 (two years after the worst year of the famine, nicknamed \u201cBlack \u201947), the British queen went to the east of Ireland (less ravaged by the famine than the west). The episode, which I saw through an online screener, shows her as being again, very concerned, about the Irish people, even though history indicates she met very few dissenters to her reign.<\/p>\n The dissenters, though, were there and continued to try to be heard.<\/p>\n From IrishCentral.com<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n In fact, it wasn\u2019t until her fourth and final visit to Ireland as an old lady in 1900, just a year before her death, that the well-known nickname of The Famine Queen came to be. The almost blind, wheelchair-using monarch was branded as such by\u00a0Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, suffragette<\/a>\u00a0and muse of W. B. Yeats, who worked alongside Irish labor leader and 1916 Easter Rising revolutionary James Connolly to protest the arrival of the British Queen in Ireland.<\/p>\n In a scathing article titled \u201cThe Famine Queen\u201d Gonne accused Queen Victoria of failing to help \u201cthe survivors of sixty years of organized famine.\u201d Although quickly banned by the British authorities, the article\u2019s damning nickname for Queen Victoria stuck. The queen found herself shouldering some of the blame for the approximately one million deaths.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One can argue how much Victoria could have done, or would have done, for Ireland, but in the sense that she stands in for England, her reputation can\u2019t remain unstained.<\/p>\nVictoria Goes to Ireland on Sunday (on TV, Anyway)<\/h4>\n
What Brits Know \u2014 and Don\u2019t Know \u2014 About the Irish Famine<\/h4>\n
So, What was the Potato Famine?<\/h4>\n
Victoria and the Famine<\/h4>\n
Victoria Makes a Carefully Planned Irish Trip<\/h4>\n