Shooting Victoria (10 page)

While Oxford regaled his audience with dark hints of reactionary conspiracy, at all gatherings throughout the metropolis—at dances and dinners, the theatre and the Opera—the attempt was on everyone's tongue. At Almack's Assembly Rooms, a venue traditionally limited to the elite of London society, a sense of melancholy prevailed: first, Lord William Russell murdered in his bedroom, and now the Queen and Prince Consort shot at: who among the aristocracy was safe? Elsewhere, the mood was more celebratory: rousing versions of “God Save the Queen” were sung; improvised speeches of horror at the attempt and joy at its failure were given. “Our theatres begin the thanksgiving,” one reporter wrote, “to be completed in our churches.”

By all accounts, Oxford slept very soundly that night, and the next morning complimented the police on the comfort of their accommodation.

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The Marble Arch would be moved to its present location outside Hyde Park in 1851, when its openings were deemed simply too small to allow the passage of the state coach.

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W
hether Oxford's pistols had been loaded with ball or not quickly became the central question to those investigating the crime. A successful prosecution for High Treason depended upon proof that Oxford had done more than startle the Queen with smoke and noise—that he had aimed and fired a bullet at her. Oxford was asked whether his guns had been loaded so many times in the hours after his arrest that he eventually refused to answer.

Immediately after Victoria and Albert drove from the scene of the shooting, all bystanders not mobbing Oxford and hauling him to the station house hastened to scrutinize the wall to the Palace gardens, hoping to find Oxford's bullets themselves or any marks they left. The Millais family was among them, and, years later, William Millais (John's brother) claimed that two bullet marks were clearly visible, marks that disappeared over the next few days,
as gawkers poked new marks into the walls with their walking-sticks and umbrellas.
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No bullets were found, however. Soon after Oxford's arrest, a large detail of officers was dispatched to the wall with birch brooms and barrows, to sweep up all the dirt beneath the walls and convey it to the station house for careful sifting. They toiled until eleven that night and for much of the next day, finding nothing. The next evening, two boys claimed to have found a ball in a place the police had already carefully scrutinized—but the police soon discovered the ball was too large for Oxford's pistol; someone, it seems, was attempting to assist the police by planting evidence against Oxford. By Friday, police attention shifted from the wall to the gardens on the other side, on the theory that Oxford had shot high and over the wall. No balls were ever found there, either.

There was never any question in the minds of Victoria and Albert, however: they had been shot at, at dangerously close range—from six paces away, according to Albert—and it was a miracle that the Queen had not been hit. “It seems the pistols were loaded,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “so our escape is indeed providential.” Albert was too surprised to notice the trajectory of Oxford's first shot, but claimed that he saw that of the second—with a certainty that transcended the actual evidence: “The ball must have passed just above [the Queen's] head,” he wrote to his grandmother, “to judge from the place where it was found sticking in an opposite wall.” The royal couple were as certain about the shooter as they were about the lethality of his shots: he was not mad, certainly, but “quiet and composed”—a villain who deserved punishment.

On Thursday morning, two angry and curious crowds gathered, one outside of the A Division station house on Gardiner Street, and the other, a short distance away, in front of the Home Office, at
Whitehall, where Oxford was to be examined. To avoid a confrontation with the crowd, the police decided to hustle Oxford out the back door. As he emerged from his cell between Inspectors Hughes and Pearce, he saw, for the first time since he had left West Place after dinner the day before, his sister Susannah, accompanied by their uncle, Edward Marklew. Susannah had been desperately applying to see him since his arrest, but his family's requests to see him were denied. Upon seeing her brother, Susannah shrieked “there he is!” and nearly fainted. After learning of the shooting, and after fetching her husband William from the soda factory, Susannah had written her mother in Birmingham with the news and then she sought her Uncle Edward's assistance. Edward Marklew, as Hannah's brother, was naturally a publican, landlord of the Ship, in the City. His assistance so far had been tireless and wholly ineffective. He had tried to obtain legal counsel for his nephew, but the solicitor he contacted refused, claiming to be too busy with the prosecution of the two sensational legal cases of the day: Courvoisier's and Gould's. Marklew had then applied at the Home Office for Oxford to have some sort of an adviser during the coming examination: if not a solicitor, then he himself asked to attend. He was turned down flat; Oxford, at this stage, would have to represent himself.

Susannah's letter to her mother in Birmingham would arrive later that day, but the police were faster; Sergeant Otway had taken the seven o'clock train from Euston Station to Birmingham, one of the first intercity train routes in Britain. He found Hannah among her relatives. Hannah received the news badly, responding with a hysterical fit, by one account, and fainting, by another. She would take the afternoon train to London and be there by the evening.

Inspectors Pearce and Hughes bundled Oxford past his sister and uncle, out the back of the station, where the three jogged through the Horse Guards' parade ground and into the back entrance to the Home Office, at Whitehall. Oxford ran, without handcuffs, and in a jocular mood. He was clearly enormously excited at the prospect of his examination by all the leading Whig politicians: Melbourne,
Russell, Palmerston, and the rest would be giving him their focused attention: he had wanted to make a noise—and the examination proved to him that he had done exactly that. If he had known of his uncle Marklew's attempts to find him counsel, he would certainly have disapproved. He had, at that moment, no desire to let anyone speak for him, and no desire to be found innocent. If his pistols had indeed been empty, he preferred everyone not to know that, seeing him instead as a dangerous conspirator with high if mysterious political connections. He was placed to wait in a room adjoining the room where depositions were to be taken, and a reporter, seeing him there, noted his self-centered pleasure: “he paced up and down the room with perfect self-possession, and an air of consequence and satisfaction, as if he felt pleased to find himself an object of so much interest.”

At eleven, Oxford was examined first by the Home Secretary and his undersecretaries, Phillipps and Maule; Normanby then decided upon a fuller examination by a larger body, at two o'clock. The ministers discussed the constitution of that larger body. Precedent was unclear as to whether the Privy Council or the Cabinet should examine the evidence. In the end, they decided upon the Cabinet. One of that body, John Cam Hobhouse, recorded his less than impressed opinion of Oxford in his diary. “He was young,” Hobhouse wrote,

… and under the middle size, neatly made, with a darkish olive complexion.
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He had black eyes and
eyebrows, dark chestnut hair. He had not a bad expression, but with a curl on his lips, as if suppressing a smile or sneer. He was dressed as became his condition, which, we were told, was that of a barman at a pothouse. There was nothing displeasing in his look or manner, until he spoke, when his pert audacity and his insolent carelessness gave him the air of a ruffian.

Maule orchestrated the examination to convince those assembled that Oxford was the shooter, and his pistols were loaded. Establishing the first point was simple: several witnesses stated that, without any doubt, they had seen Oxford shoot; three of these testified as to Oxford's incriminating statement, upon his capture, that he had done the shooting. Establishing that the pistols had been loaded was more difficult, as no ball had been found despite an intensive search. One witness, however, claimed that the ball “passed directly before my face,” with a whizzing sound, and another that he had seen a mark left by one of the balls on the wall.

Oxford was given the opportunity to question each of the witnesses, and his questions—punctuated by his uncanny bursts of laughter—did little to further his case, and nothing in particular to challenge the flimsy evidence that his pistols had been loaded. Rather, he quibbled about details: some witnesses claimed that he had shot his two pistols with his two hands, some that he shot both using one hand; one witness claimed that he was between five and eight yards away from the royal carriage when he shot the second time, another that he was thirty yards away. Allowed to make a final statement, Oxford reiterated these discrepancies, and couldn't resist impugning Albert's reported courage, claiming that he jumped up at the sound of the first pistol and shrank back at the sight of the second. “Then,” Oxford said, “I fired the second pistol. This is all I shall say at present.”

Nothing Oxford did or said affected the cabinet's decision, and he was bound over for trial on the charge of High Treason. Home
Secretary Normanby drew up a warrant for Governor William Wadham Cope of Newgate Prison to take in Oxford as soon as he could be transferred from the Home Office. Oxford was removed, still apparently in good spirits. If he had considered the government's line of questioning more closely, however, he might have been more concerned. Although Inspector Hughes did tell the Cabinet about Oxford's box of secrets, that was as far as any reference to Young England went. The police still took the conspiracy theory very seriously: they had gotten it into their heads that the handwriting on all of Oxford's documents was not actually Oxford's, and considered it possible, at the very least, that another person might have encouraged Oxford to shoot the Queen—a Truelock to Oxford's Hadfield. But the government was not interested in establishing Oxford as a conspirator. Already, the image that Oxford had worked so hard to create—the myth of the valiant Bravo—was on the decline. The caricature of the foolish potboy was on the ascent.

Outside of the examination room, Oxford once again saw his family: Susannah, flanked by her husband William and uncle Edward. This time, Oxford was able to embrace his sister. Her distress was palpable and infectious, and Oxford began to cry. The police separated the two forcibly. Oxford did however manage to recover his highwayman's mien for one act of gallantry before leaving for Newgate, laughing and flourishing his hat to some girls in the building's lobby. At a few minutes before six, Hughes and Pearce clapped a cap on Oxford's head to disguise him, and put him in a coach for the journey up the Strand, Fleet Street, and Ludgate Hill, up Old Bailey to the door of Newgate Prison, where he was taken into custody by Governor Cope.

With the shooter safely shut away in the decaying bowels of Newgate Prison, Oxford's motive became the focus of discussion, and rumors connecting others with the crime began to fly. One of these held that the letters E R were stamped on Oxford's pistols or his pistol case—suggesting Oxford was acting on the orders of
Ernestus Rex
, the King of Hanover. And while many (Baron Stockmar and Albert's personal secretary George Anson among them) could not believe that Hanover was directly involved, many took seriously the possibility that “Young England” was real: a reactionary, ultra-Tory movement bent on destroying the British constitution (as Uncle Ernest had abolished the Hanoverian one) and bringing absolutist government to Britain. Daniel O'Connell, the defender of Irish Catholics, was not alone in holding this view, but was its strongest articulator, seeing in the threat of Victoria's death a particular danger to her Irish subjects. Ten days after the shooting, in a letter addressed to the people of Ireland, O'Connell railed against the “underlings of that Orange-Tory faction which naturally detests the virtues of our beloved Queen.” If Victoria had died, O'Connell thundered,

I shudder even to think of the scenes that would have followed. I have no doubt that the Tory party in England would submit to be converted into another Hanover. They would sacrifice to the last remnant all constitutional liberty for the sake of enjoying irresponsible power. The gratification of trampling upon Ireland and the Irish would amply repay that worthless faction for the loss of any vain boast of ancient freedom.

O'Connell was convinced that Oxford had had assistance: how else, he argued, could this potboy obtain respectable clothing, serviceable pistols, and the training to use them? One persistent rumor in support of this theory held that a respectable, older man had stood near Oxford as the Queen's carriage approached, and gave him the signal to fire.