‘The wretched creature, not out of his mind, but a thorough scamp … I hope his trial will be conducted with the greatest strictness.’
LETTER FROM ALBERT TO HIS FATHER, THE DUKE OF SAXE-COBURG AND GOTHA, ON JOHN FRANCIS, 31 MAY 1842 
THEN, AS NOW, there were downsides to becoming an icon. As Victoria became more of a national and international figurehead, she also became more of a target. During the Queen’s reign there were no less than seven attempts made on her life by thought-to-be assassins. She became the subject of obsessional behaviour, particularly of men – Captain Childers’s repeated offers to ‘save’ Victoria from the ‘German’ tyranny of Albert was shown in the first series of Victoria and is an early example of such behaviour, but there were others, and some of them were even more determined. It was also not unheard of for prostitutes to be asked to ‘dress like Her Majesty’ and engage in ‘right royal role-play’ with their clients. Albert attracted his fair share of negative attention, too, including abusive letters, but nobody was to make an attempt on his life.
The Queen’s most persistent stalker was known as the Boy Jones (see also here–here), who from the age of fourteen brazenly broke into Buckingham Palace on several occasions between 1838 and 1841. There is no question that security at the palace was initially lax and Jones’s incursions meant that this issue was promptly addressed by Prince Albert, who took on extra guards and instigated strict routines for the locking of doors and windows. Jones’s interest in the Queen, however, was less threatening and rather more of a nuisance compared to those who fired guns at her, which, in 1842, happened twice within a matter of weeks. When the first assassination attempt was made on Victoria’s life in 1840 the man in question, Edward Oxford, was found insane by the court.
EDWARD JONES WAS obsessed with Victoria and how she and the royal family lived. The son of a Westminster tailor, ‘the Boy Jones’, as he was dubbed, was first arrested aged fourteen in 1838 when he managed to get into the palace disguised as a chimney sweep. A porter caught him in the Marble Hall and gave chase. Jones was captured in St James’s Street and was found to have Victoria’s underwear stuffed down his trousers. He had also stolen a regimental sword. When asked why he had broken in, he said he’d always wanted to see inside Buckingham Palace and was thinking of writing a book about it.
Then, shortly after Princess Victoria’s birth in 1840, Jones once more climbed over the palace wall and got in through an unlocked, unshuttered window. On this occasion, he left without being caught, which suggests there may well have been other occasions when he visited the palace and nobody detected him. A few days after this break-in he came back again and was caught under a sofa in Victoria’s dressing room by Baroness Lehzen.
It was, of course, alarming to Prince Albert that Jones had gained access to the palace with such ease when there was a new baby in the nursery and the Queen was particularly vulnerable. To limit the publicity surrounding this lack of security at the palace, Jones was tried in secret and sentenced to three months in a house of correction. But he didn’t give up! Almost as soon as he was released in March 1841, he broke back into Buckingham Palace and was caught eating stolen food from a table in the royal apartments. He was also caught on two further occasions, sitting on the throne. This time he was sentenced to hard labour. When he was released he was offered a large sum of money (four pounds a week) to appear on stage in a music hall production, but he refused. Instead, he was caught loitering near the palace.
The Establishment (Albert included) decided to turn to the Navy for help. Jones was kidnapped (or, as it was called, ‘pressed into service’) and sent overseas. Despite a tour to Brazil, he turned up in London again and the Navy incarcerated him in a prison ship for six years, eventually deporting him to Australia.
It was because of Jones that new security measures were adopted within the palace and extra guards put in place. Prince Albert oversaw these arrangements himself. The Boy Jones, in time, became a running joke in newspapers and magazines, and the story of his obsession with Victoria followed him all his life. Later, Jones became an alcoholic and a burglar, and, despite returning to the UK after his deportation, he eventually settled in Perth, Australia, where he became the town crier. Even there, he was persecuted by jokes about his younger days, and his brother reported that these jokes annoyed him tremendously.
Boy Jones.
SIR ROBERT PEEL:
I wonder, Ma’am, given the considerable discontent among the lower orders at the moment, if a ball might be misconstrued.
ON 29 MAY 1842, Albert spotted a man pulling a gun and levelling it at the Queen while the royal couple were on a short carriage ride from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. He didn’t fire, but Albert was adamant that the threat was real and he was alarmed enough to make a plan. Victoria and Albert decided jointly not to change their routine and to try to ‘draw out’ this potential assassin the next day, with two equerries riding close to the carriage as an extra security measure. And sure enough, on 30 May, at around six in the evening, 20-year-old John Francis, the son of a machine maker, stood on Constitution Hill waiting for the royal couple to return to the palace in their barouche from a drive on Hampstead Heath. Francis drew his flintlock and a police constable named Tanner, who was on duty (and had been alerted to be vigilant), bravely rushed towards the would-be assassin and knocked the gun from his hand. The shot fired but did not hurt anyone – neither the Queen or the Prince, nor the policeman or any of the public nearby.
Francis was unrepentant. When he was taken into custody he said, ‘Damn the Queen! Why should she be such an expense to the nation?’ And despite the public outrage at his actions, there was some sympathy towards Francis’s statement – the country’s finances were, after all, in a parlous state. Sir Robert Peel had just imposed the first income tax ever to be levied in peacetime on incomes exceeding £150 a year and the Corn Laws were driving up food prices and causing political unrest across the country. And at the same time Victoria had announced her intention to throw the lavish masked Plantagenet Ball ‘to stimulate trade’ (see here–here), a move that looked dangerously like profligacy.
‘Peel was quite a fusty, prosaic man, used to dealing with people older than Victoria. In the second series Peel is at the height of his powers at a very exciting time in English history and that’s very interesting to play. I think Peel realised Victoria was so much more than her stature and her age. I think he saw that, whereas politicians come and go, the monarch was the one stable force.’
‘A cold, odd man.’
VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, ON SIR ROBERT PEEL, 8 MAY 1839
INITIALLY, VICTORIA DIDN’T like Sir Robert Peel, the Tory prime minister who took over from Lord Melbourne in 1841. Lord Melbourne had been her favourite and she saw Peel as a usurper. However, Albert supported Sir Robert and gradually Victoria changed her mind about him. This may be, in part, because Lord Melbourne passed on tips to Peel on how to approach the Queen, advising him to explain clearly the reasons for anything he had to propose: ‘She likes having things explained … in detail … shortly and clearly,’ he said. Melbourne also advised Peel not to irritate Victoria by talking about religion.
At first Peel was shy with the Queen. He had a habit of fidgeting, which Victoria said reminded her of a dancing master. However, by the end of Peel’s term as prime minister, he had gained her affection and a bond had formed between them. Stepping down and leaving the Queen was, he said, ‘one of the most painful moments’ of his life.
Peel’s time in office had a huge effect in many spheres. He set up the Metropolitan Police Force at Scotland Yard in 1829 – the constables were known as ‘bobbies’, named after him – essentially making him the father of the modern police force. As prime minister, he oversaw several reforms to employment in factories, limiting working hours for women and children. And as a committed Anglican, he was also moved by the Irish Potato Famine (see here–here) and set himself to repealing the Corn Laws (see here–here) so that food aid could be delivered to Ireland, splitting his own party in the process. And in a dramatic turn of events, Peel was also the target of an assassination attempt that resulted in the accidental killing of Edward Drummond, his personal secretary, in 1843. London was shocked by this attempt and huge crowds turned out to mourn Drummond.
Peel was only prime minister for six years in total – over two terms – but his influence was huge and his political career overall spanned two decades. He is credited with creating the modern Conservative Party and is one of the nineteenth century’s most influential politicians. After his death in 1850, a statue was erected to his memory in Parliament Square in London. He had five children with his wife, Julia, and their four sons all went on to have distinguished political or military careers.
‘I maintain that the existing corn laws are bad, because they have given a monopoly of food to the landed interest over every other class and over every other interest in the kingdom.’
DOCTOR AND RADICAL MP JOSEPH HUME
THE CORN LAWS ran from 1815 to 1846 and imposed restrictions and tariffs on imported grain to keep prices high for domestic producers. This meant the price of food was higher than it needed to be in early Victorian Britain. Many ordinary people opposed the Corn Laws and when the Anti-Corn Law League was set up in 1839, sponsored by rich Whig supporters, it focused on opposition to the Corn Laws, calling meetings and lobbying politicians, voters and press interest.
Sir Robert Peel tackled the Corn Laws in 1842, modifying the sliding scale of charges on imports of grain. Later, as the Irish Potato Famine became increasingly acute in 1845 (see also here–here), he decided to go further. Peel was not popular among his own back-bench MPs at Westminster and his Conservative Party was made up of many supporters with farming interests, but so dire was the situation in Ireland, the Irish Famine meant that he was prepared to risk splitting his own party and endangering his own position as prime minister. This, in fact, is exactly what happened – while some Conservatives backed Peel’s moral stand on the Corn Laws and the vote he forced through to repeal them, almost half his party voted against him and the bill was only passed thanks to a minority of his own Conservatives and a majority of the Whig (Liberal) opposition and some independent free traders. In June 1846, the bill was then pushed through the House of Lords by the Duke of Wellington. Soon after this break with his own party, Peel’s Irish Coercion Bill – intended to suppress the agitation that was brewing in Ireland – was defeated in the Commons, and Peel felt forced to resign immediately.
A caricature lambasting British Prime Minister Robert Peel for his stance on the Corn Laws which placed duties on imported and exported grain.
WHEN VICTORIA GOT back to the palace after the gun incident she first ran to tell Baroness Lehzen what had happened, then she informed the rest of her family. Her uncles rallied round in support, but perhaps the young Queen didn’t need it. In her diary entry that night she sounds almost breathless with excitement. ‘They all said it was very brave of me to have gone out, knowing, as we did, for certain, since the morning that this man was about. I felt quite agitated & excited.’ She declared, ‘When I think of what might have happened, I shudder!’
Victoria’s uncles were not the only ones who were impressed by her nerve; the day after Francis’s assassination attempt, Londoners turned out to cheer her bravery when she took her usual carriage ride in the afternoon. Victoria refused to be cowed by any assassination attempts made on her life and the public loved her for it. Her uncle, Count Emmanuel Mensdorff-Pouilly, insisted on riding with her when she went out the following day, and from then on a detail of Metropolitan Police followed the Queen wherever she went. The decision on how and where she would travel always rested with Victoria, though, and she took the attitude that she would not be kept a prisoner in the palace. That evening when she attended the opera she recorded that ‘the whole House rose, cheered, & waved their hats & handkerchiefs. “God save the Queen” was sung & there was immense applause at the end of each verse.’ The public certainly appreciated Victoria’s pluck.
‘It now only remains for me to pass upon you the sentence of the law, which is that you, John Francis … be hanged by the neck until you be dead …’
JUDGE’S REMARKS AT THE TRIAL OF JOHN FRANCIS, AS REPORTED IN THE SHEFFIELD INDEPENDENT , 25 June 1842
JUST OVER A fortnight later, Francis appeared in court, charged on four counts, including high treason, and was found guilty. He was sentenced to death by being hanged and quartered – the traditional (medieval) sentence for regicide being to be hanged, drawn (tortured) and quartered (cut into pieces). On hearing what was to happen to Francis, Edward Oxford, who had shot at the Queen two years before, remarked that had he been hanged, this second attempt would never have been made. However, it was generally felt that the death sentence was too harsh a penalty even for an attempt on the Queen’s life, given that Francis had nowhere near succeeded. There were also reservations among the Establishment that if a man was hanged for a failed attempt, future juries might be unwilling to convict for the same offence because the death penalty seemed too great a price. In the end, Victoria commuted Francis’s sentence to transportation to Australia for life and he was sent across the world to face a long term of hard labour in a penal colony. Quickly, Sir Robert Peel brought forward an Act of Parliament that changed the legal view of an attempt on the life of the reigning monarch from high treason to ‘high misdemeanour’. This meant that in future the penalty was reduced to a term of imprisonment and a sentence of whipping.
That summer, the gossiping classes talked of little else but Francis’s attempt on the Queen’s life and how it had been averted, and despite his comments on his arrest, the newspapers pronounced that the Queen’s assassin was not driven by revolutionary desire but by a ‘diseased craving for notoriety’ instead. In an elegant new security measure, Albert designed Victoria a parasol armed with chainmail, though it is unknown whether she carried this with her when she ventured out in her carriage.
‘Lord Abinger said, he should be doing a violence to his own feelings, and to the feelings of all who heard him, if he did not pass upon him the heaviest sentence the common law of the land allows …’
~JUDGE’S REMARKS AT THE TRIAL OF JOHN WILLIAM BEAN, AS REPORTED IN THE SUFFOLK CHRONICLE ; OR WEEKLY GENERAL ADVERTISER & COUNTY EXPRESS , SATURDAY, 27 AUGUST 1842
THE SECOND ATTEMPT made on the Queen’s life that summer took place on 3 July, when Victoria and Albert were driving in a carriage along the Mall. John William Bean, who was described as a ‘humpback’ wearing a long, brown coat, pushed his way to the front of the crowd that had assembled to wave at the royal couple, and pulled out a pistol. A sixteen-year-old boy standing near him, Charles Edward Dassett, grabbed hold of Bean’s wrist and dragged the assailant across the road, where he told two policemen what had happened. For whatever reason, the officers, Hearn and Claxton, did not take the incident seriously and dismissed the valiant young vigilante, letting Bean go.
A few hours later, Dassett was apprehended in Green Park for having a pistol in his hand – the one he had taken from Bean. He again told the story of what had happened and this time the police went on the hunt for other witnesses. Hearn and Claxton were suspended from duty for not taking action, and when other witnesses came forward Dassett was released. That evening, police arrested Bean at his father’s house in Clerkenwell. Several newspapers reported that he had written a letter, which declared that he might not ‘see his father again; that he would not do anything dishonest, but he might because desperate, & signing himself “Your unhappy & disobedient son”’.
When arrested, Bean was contrite, saying he had waited for three days to take his shot, but had not intended to hurt the Queen, as he had only loaded the gun with paper and gunpowder and had pointed it at the ground. He was presumably hoping to be transported, just like Francis.
‘There were a huge amount of actors and big scenes, which everyone would be in, and they each had to look right.’
ROSALIND EBBUTT, COSTUME DESIGNER
Many of the supporting artists on the set of season two of Victoria are regulars hired from local agencies. They need to arrive on set ready to be made up as real Victorians – and occasionally there have been problems when an extra arrives and looks nothing like their photograph. On one occasion, someone turned up with their hair dyed blue, so they had to come back once the dye had been washed out. In general, it’s best if extras don’t have tattoos, a tan or highlighted, coloured or close-cut hair – and anyone with a shaved head is out!
Lots of extras have other, regular part-time jobs or are retired. Shooting days are long and there is a lot of sitting around, waiting until you’re needed, so patience is also a requirement. Everyone has to turn up in the morning, even if they aren’t needed till later, so it’s not unusual to see footmen or housemaids on their laptops, knitting, reading or talking on their mobile phones. Luckily there is always tea and coffee available on set for those who are waiting around, and a catering truck provides breakfasts and lunches over the course of the day. If a background character becomes established even in a non-speaking part, they cannot take part in other crowd scenes – so for some extras it’s once a kitchen maid, always a kitchen maid.
When it’s time to go on set, the costumes, hair and make-up must be exactly right. Shooting a historical drama makes filming a longer process while all of this important detail is meticulously checked. Every extra is photographed from different angles so that the look can be exactly reproduced if part of a scene has to be reshot.
It’s common for up to eighty supporting artists to be required either on set or on location for big crowd scenes. Anything larger and the CGI team are brought in to create the illusion of more people. Individual extras are shot from different angles against a green screen and then ‘dropped’ into the background, their image altered slightly in each incarnation.
Special effects in historical drama are about recreating history. As visual effects producer Louise Hastings explains, ‘The effects need to be invisible to transport the audience back to the Victorian era.’ It all has to look absolutely authentic and real. For sweeping scenes of old London, for example, the CGI team used maps and old paintings for reference, then added in horses, carriages and chimney smoke, as well as crowds on the streets, to recreate the capital city as it was 170 years ago.
VICTORIA ONLY HEARD of Bean’s thwarted attempt afterwards. She was told by the MP Sir James Graham, who visited the Queen after she had returned to Buckingham Palace and had eaten her lunch. ‘How mad and strange all this is!’ she declared. ‘But how providence watches over us.’ She claimed to have had a premonition of the attack and had remarked to Albert as they walked in Buckingham Palace Gardens only two days before that she felt another attempt on her life was imminent. The next day, when Sir Robert Peel visited the Queen, he reputedly wept, thinking of what might have happened. Victoria herself was more pragmatic, dismissing Bean’s attempt and saying the gun would never have caused much damage, not being properly loaded. She also seems to have taken a certain glee in the fact that Bean was considered very ugly by all those who wrote reports of him. His trial lasted just six hours. He was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months in Newgate prison.
‘Every noble work is at first impossible.’
PHILOSOPHER, HISTORIAN AND CHARTIST THOMAS CARLYLE
THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT was a working-class movement for democratic political reform that ran from 1838 to 1848. It was named after the People’s Charter, which called for wider voting rights, secret ballots in elections, payment of MPs, constituency reform and abolition of the requirement for MPs to be men of property. Millions of people signed their names in support of the Charter and huge mass meetings were held across the country. Some newspapers supported the movement and articles were read out in workplaces, public houses and at meetings for the benefit of the illiterate.
The House of Commons’ repeated refusal to hear the petitioners resulted in a furious backlash, leading to strikes, riots and insurrection. In 1842 hundreds of arrests were made as the uprisings broke out. Though the national executive of the Chartist movement was found not guilty, many supporters were imprisoned or transported. In fact, many Chartists who were transported in this period continued to militate in British colonies and achieved reform there.
The Chartists also agitated against the Church of England and campaigned for a separation of Church and State and an end to huge wages for senior bishops and dignitaries. Even a Chartist hymnbook was commissioned, containing hymns about social injustice.
In 1847 a Chartist MP was finally elected and in 1848 a mass meeting was organised at Kennington Common. The Chartists claimed at this point that they had a total of 6 million signatures for the Charter, though government officials put the figure at 1.9 million. Either way, given that 1848 was a year of huge political instability all across Europe and there were revolts against the monarchies of Germany, France, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and the Austrian Empire, the Chartist movement was particularly alarming for Victoria.
Ultimately, though, the movement was unsuccessful and it disbanded. By the end of Victoria’s reign, however, many of the reforms the Chartists had pushed for had come about in political life and Britain had achieved change – without a revolution.
Top: Mass meeting of Chartists on Kennington Common, 1 January 1848. Bottom: Cartoon of Chartists’ attempt to force a giant charter through Parliament.
IN THESE EARLY years of the couple’s reign, all was not well beyond the palace walls – Chartism was on the rise, social conditions were poor, the Potato Famine was decimating the Irish population and across Europe revolutions were brewing. Victoria’s strength in the face of these attempts was an important factor in bringing the public onside and rallying ordinary citizens to the royal cause. It would be difficult not to admire the young Queen’s pluck even if you didn’t support Sir Robert Peel’s income tax or the expenditure passed by Parliament to keep up the Royal Household. Nonetheless, Albert made sure that staff, police officers and military units were increasingly aware of the risk to the royals as they went about their daily lives and that they were primed to take action. It was almost a decade before another attempt was made on the Queen’s life.
DR TRAILL:
I saw a woman die today, Anne. Of starvation. She left five children.
A line of ‘Peelers’.
‘The Almighty sent the potato blight but the English created the Famine.’
IRISH ACTIVIST, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST JOHN MITCHEL
THE IRISH POTATO Famine started in 1845 when the first potato crops failed in Ireland. Potato blight was endemic across Europe in this period, but the famine hit hardest in Ireland mainly because the situation was not managed competently, either by the government at Westminster or by the absentee landlords of the Irish estates. About a third of the Irish population relied on potatoes as their main source of food, but most were tenants with little right over the land they farmed, and as a result they had few reserves to help them through the hard times. Grain was also grown in Ireland, but this was reserved for export and the price was protected by the Corn Laws (see here–here). When the Corn Laws were repealed by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in 1846, the price of corn plummeted, as did the price of agricultural land and labour.
‘In company with Dr Traill, the Rector of Schull, I met Dr McCormick, the dispensary physician of the parish of Kilmoe; he stated that on Tuesday, March 9, he had met a man, a father, tottering along the road – a rope was over his shoulder, and at the other end of the rope, streeling along the ground, were two dead children, whom he was with difficulty dragging to the grave.’
Dr Traill, a protestant rector from Schull in Cork, tried to persuade local landlords to keep their grain in Ireland and save seed potatoes for use. He also wrote to the British government, giving an eye-witness account of what was going on and appealing for help. Traill tried his best to help his congregation and those beyond their number living in the area, but there were simply too many people in need and he had few resources. In real life, he didn’t visit Buckingham Palace, as is depicted in the series.
At first the government responded to the famine by setting up soup kitchens, instituting new workhouses and starting a programme of public works, but these had a limited effect and, in fact, slowed public charitable donation as it was felt that the taxpayer was taking care of the situation. As the famine progressed Victoria herself sent a £2,000 donation and wrote a ‘queen’s letter’ to promote the fundraising drive, and suggested instituted ‘fast’ days to draw attention to the issue, but none of this eased the situation and the message sent by government action continued to be mixed. When America sent a ship of grain to feed the Irish, for example, British customs officers impounded it, claiming it would disturb trade. It has been calculated that there was enough grain available to mitigate the famine’s effect in Ireland but these resources were simply not distributed. The prevailing political doctrine of the day was the market should be left to find its own level. This was disastrous for those in Ireland who were now starving to death, and as the crisis grew there was a dogmatic refusal at Westminster to accept that government policy was not working.
‘I saw the dying, the living and the dead lying indiscriminately on the same floor.’
ARTIST JAMES MAHONEY, CORK, AN EYE WITNESS TO THE FAMINE
Within a couple of years of the blight hitting Ireland, absentee landlords started to order their agents to evict tenants for non-payment of rent. This made the situation worse and furious Irish activists took violent revenge on landlords and landlords’ agents – several were murdered. At home, as the suffering rolled on, the British public had their sympathies dulled by ‘famine fatigue’, fuelled by the public view that the Irish Catholic population were indolent and had too many children. The press portrayed the Irish as freeloaders who lacked self-reliance, and day after day headlines reported the famine as an act of providence.
Ultimately, a million Irish citizens died from starvation, malnutrition or diseases associated with lack of food. Many more emigrated. The famine has become a folk memory and Queen Victoria is known in Ireland as the ‘Famine Queen’. Victoria visited Ireland after the famine in 1849, and though the Viceroy did his best to protect her from the reality of the situation, she noted that ‘men are very poorly, often raggedly dressed’. It was quickly recognised that government action could and should have been more effective and that although Peel had done his best he walked an unsteady line between his own conscience and the hard-line political view that the market must be allowed to run its own course, which, sadly, was the attitude that prevailed.
Scenes of the Irish Potato Famine.
One of the challenges of writing Victoria is trying to make the political turmoil of the 1840s relevant to a modern audience. My approach is to try to find the personal story that illustrates the political reality. When it came to the Potato Famine in Ireland, I had a personal interest. My great-great-great-grandfather, Dr Robert Traill, was the rector of Schull, a small town in County Cork, in the 1840s, and had a vital role to play in the Irish Potato Famine.
Dr Traill was an evangelical Protestant who went to the Catholic southwest hoping to convert what he called the ‘papist heathen’. He was not successful. The Catholic peasantry revolted against paying tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland – they burnt an effigy of Traill outside the church and threw burning torches at the rectory. Traill, his wife Anne and their five children lived under virtual house arrest in a fortified rectory, completely estranged from the native population. But when the first signs of the potato blight appeared in 1845, Traill, who had spent the last ten years translating the Hebrew historian Josephus’ account of the Jewish revolt against Roman rule, found awful echoes of the biblical famine in the countryside outside his door.
Although he had hardly spoken to a Catholic before this point, Traill was so horrified by the suffering around him that he decided it was his mission to make the government in England realise just how catastrophic the failure of the potato harvest was to the Irish peasantry. His letters to The Irish Times are masterpieces of impassioned rhetoric. Traill says that if the government does not send relief, ‘then many more will be blotted from the book of being’. Traill’s stand was not popular with his superiors in the Church of Ireland, who felt rather as the English government did, that the Catholic peasantry had brought this misfortune upon themselves by relying too heavily upon potatoes. But unlike many of his Protestant colleagues, Traill did not offer food in return for attendance at his church – a practice that came to be known as ‘souperism’; instead, he sent his wife and children to Dublin, joined forces with a local Catholic priest and turned his rectory into a soup kitchen that fed everyone in his parish, regardless of their religious denomination. It was a remarkable change of heart.
The failure of the potato crop had a devastating effect on Ireland; its population, which was eight million in 1840, had more than halved by the end of the decade – a drop caused by death and mass emigration to the New World. Traill himself died of famine fever in 1847. After he passed away, the Church of Ireland sued his wife for damage to the rectory.
