Shooting Victoria (2 page)

It was, on paper, an organization of over four hundred armed members. And when this document became public, many believed Oxford to be a part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to overthrow the Queen's government. But Young England was entirely Oxford's own creation, and this manifesto, though signed by a fictitious secretary Smith, was in Oxford's own handwriting. His hundred troops and the generals existed only in his own mind. This fantasy was to Oxford a compelling—now, controlling—one, for that fantasy gave him a stature wholly denied him in everyday life, as well as a profound sense of self-worth and purpose in a life that heretofore lacked both.

He was in the process of creating and collecting the props with which to support this fantasy. He had the cap. The sword would come. Today he would buy what he needed most to perform fully the role of a Captain of Young England: a matching brace of pistols. The shop selling the pistols was a short walk through Southwark, up the London Road, past the obelisk at St. George's Circle and the philanthropic institutions for the blind and for repentant prostitutes. Oxford likely knew nothing of what went on inside these places, but he did know the streets and the shops of Southwark well. Although he had just moved in with his family, he had lived here as a child, attending school in Lambeth; and, until the age of fourteen, he assisted his mother with a coffee shop she had run on the Waterloo Road. Oxford slipped into the human press traveling up Blackfriars Road, the bustling thoroughfare leading to Blackfriars Bridge and to the City, and ducked into Hayes's general goods store.

He wanted guns that would make an impression, that befit the important plans of Captain Oxford. Style was everything to Oxford, accuracy secondary. Hayes had exactly what he needed: a pair of dueling pistols with handsomely carved stocks. These pistols incorporated the very latest advance in firearms—the percussive cap. For the past two hundred years, most firearms had been flintlocks, on which a snapping, grinding flint would ignite loose powder, which ignited the powder in the barrel of the gun, firing the ball. By the 1830s, and because of refinements in percussive gunpowder—that is, gunpowder that would explode not upon ignition, but upon impact—flintlocks became increasingly obsolete, more and more likely to be found in pawnshops. Newer, flintless pistols fired when a cocked hammer engaged and struck a percussive cap. Like flintlocks, however, these percussive pistols were muzzle-loaded. The pistols Oxford was buying could each be fired only once; to fire again, he would have to reload powder, wadding, and ball through the front of the gun, and replace the percussive cap.

Although dueling was technically illegal, the practice was carried on, Wimbledon Common being a favorite venue. Indeed, just two months before, Prince Louis Napoleon, then in exile in London, was involved in a duel there with his cousin, the Comte Léon—a contest broken up before it started by Inspector Pearce of the Metropolitan Police (whom Oxford would soon meet). Dueling pistols, then, were still available for purchase. But these particular pistols hardly suited the purpose of the duelist, unless that purpose was to miss: they were not weapons of quality. They were priced at two guineas, or 42 shillings—overpriced, according to one gunmaker, who later valued them at less than 30 shillings. Certainly, there were cheaper pistols to be had, but a guinea apiece hardly suggested fine workmanship. Experts would later describe them as “coarsely and roughly finished,” designed more for show than effect. They were manufactured in Birmingham, the center of the British firearms industry at the time, but they bore no maker's mark—an obvious sign of their shoddiness. When Charles Dickens later described Oxford's pistols as “Brummagem firearms,” he intended to emphasize their utter worthlessness as weapons, virtually guaranteed to miss their targets. Oxford was certainly no expert on firearms, but he must have had some sense of the limitations of these pistols when he asked the young clerk assisting him how far a bullet would carry from them: twenty or thirty yards, he was told.

That was enough for his purpose. What was important was that he look the part: Captain Oxonian, standing steadily as he took one shot, and then another; like a duelist, a highwayman, a bravo—a dashing, handsome, romantic figure, a gentleman worthy of the world's attention. The guns were perfect for that effect. And they were guns that he could afford. With typical Victorian haggling, he bargained down the price of the pistols from 2 guineas (or £2 and 2 shillings) to £2. With the two shillings he saved, he bought a powder-flask and two bags for the pistols. The clerk took Oxford's money and entered the transaction on a slate, which his employer, Mr. Hayes, logged into his account book the next day.

Oxford made his way back past the obelisk and through the warren of side streets, to 6 West Square. Though the lodgings, kept by Mrs. Packman, were new to Oxford, his mother, his sister, and his brother-in-law had been living there for some time. Their choice of residence suggests a position of some comfort in the upper ranks of the working class, at least. A clergyman lived there, as did some of the professionals who staffed Bethlem. Oxford's mother, Hannah, had attempted a number of businesses of her own—a public house, a coffee shop—but all had eventually failed. Others in her family were more successful, however, and helpful to her: she apparently supported herself with a legacy. Oxford's brother-in-law, William Phelps, husband of his older sister, Susannah, was a baker who worked at a local soda-water factory but was on the verge of a major career change: he was days away from joining the Metropolitan Police. Oxford's family, then, fit the upscale proletarian precincts of West Street. Oxford himself, however, was far less comfortably situated. He had engaged with Mrs. Packman for a separate room, and for a separate rent. Oxford had no legacy, and no employment. The rent would quickly prove too much for him to pay, and he would very soon fall into arrears.

Oxford found his mother Hannah at home and lost no time showing her his pistols. While she knew nothing of his locked box of secrets, she did know of his childhood obsession with gunpowder and weaponry, remembering his fascination with toy cannons and remembering the arm injury he suffered as a boy, nearly blowing himself up while playing with fire and gunpowder, burning his eyebrows off and keeping him up for two nights screaming with pain. She knew, as well, that her child ached to be somebody. He had often spun out for her grandiose plans to rise in the world. A favorite dream of his came straight out of Captain Marryat's then-popular novels—the very sort of fiction Oxford loved to read. He would join the Royal Navy and move quickly up the ranks. “He said he would allow me half his pay,” Hannah would later say in court, “and how proud I should be of my son when I saw his name in
the papers, Admiral Sir Edward Oxford!” All he needed to realize that ambition, he told her, would be a midshipman's place, which he could obtain for £50. He had begged her to return to her family in Birmingham to get it for him. On this day, he proudly showed her his pistols as a sign of his higher stature and a promise of his coming renown.

She was not pleased. Her son had just given up his job as a barman at the Hog in the Pound, a popular public house on Oxford Street across the river. Hannah had been exhorting him to find a job since he moved in, but he made it clear to her that he was in no hurry to do that: “He said nothing was stirring, and he should rather wait till a good place offered itself than answer advertisements.” And now he had wasted a huge portion of his £5—a full quarter's pay for a barman—on these pistols. “How could you think of laying your money out in such folly!” she cried out, exasperated. Oxford, humiliated, lied to her. He had not paid for these new pistols, he explained; he was simply holding them for a friend.

And then, as often happened, the shame and inadequacy he felt turned to a blind rage, the sort of rage that had previously manifested itself in his breaking anything that he could grab hold of. His mother simply could not understand how important these pistols were to him, could not understand that he was not just a barman and was not destined to live a barman's life. He was not a servant; he was
Oxonian
, Captain of Young England!

He raised one of the pistols and pointed it, cocked, at his mother's face.

That same day—4 May 1840—a diminutive young woman sat quietly a mile and a half across the River Thames in her home in the very greenest part of London, while an artist sketched her face. Queen Victoria was only two years older than Edward Oxford, a few weeks away from her twenty-first birthday. For the last three years she had sat on the British throne. The artist was her current favorite, George Hayter, who, as her official portrait painter, had
depicted many of the important events in her short life. He had, at the request of her Uncle Leopold, painted her when she was a thirteen-year-old princess and heir apparent. He had painted her with her court in full pomp at her 1838 coronation. And, most famously, he had in 1838 depicted her as every inch a queen, yet very much an innocent, in her state portrait: she sits, enthroned and crowned, in a flowing, virginal white dress bedecked with the heavy robes of state, gazing to the side and upwards beyond her scepter with a hint of a wide-eyed surprise interrupting her placidity, as if she contemplated the many coming years of her reign with wonder and confidence.

And now, Hayter was sketching her for another commemoration of an important event in her reign—indeed, a turning point: Victoria's marriage to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which had taken place just three months before. Hayter was this time intent on capturing a very different Victoria than he had in the state portrait. In the finished wedding portrait, Victoria and Albert stand together, surrounded by and yet apart from the crowd. Victoria is dressed in white satin, a circlet of white flowers in her hair; Albert is dressed in the brilliant red uniform of a British field marshal. To Victoria's other side stands her beaming uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who gave her away, and to Albert's side stands Victoria's mother (and his aunt), the Duchess of Kent, staring intently forward. The rest of the guests form a semicircle around the wedding party, the men generally in red uniforms and the women in white, imperfectly reflecting the colors of the royal couple: Victoria and Albert literally shine in the spotlight created by the rays of the sun as they pour through an upper window of the Chapel Royal of the Palace of St. James. Victoria's expression is very much as it was in the state portrait, gazing upward in surprise and wonder. But the object of her gaze has changed completely: instead of contemplating an unseen and solitary future, it is Albert alone who is the object of her attention.

Victoria was in love with Albert, deeply and wholly, and she had no doubt whatsoever that the marriage to him was good, and
right, not only for herself but for the nation as well, elevating her and it into something greater. The day after her wedding, she wrote from Windsor to her (and Albert's) Uncle Leopold, to proclaim as much:

I write to you from here the happiest, happiest Being that ever existed. Really, I do not think it possible for any one in the world to be happier, or as happy as I am. He is an Angel, and his kindness and affection for me is really touching. To look in those dear eyes, and that dear sunny face, is enough to make me adore him. What I can do to make him happy will be my greatest delight. Independent of my great personal happiness, the reception we both met with yesterday was the most gratifying and enthusiastic I ever experienced; there was no end of the crowds in London, and all along the road.

Her new attachment, however, did not come without its confusions and potential problems. Albert was her husband and, by the domestic ideals of the time, her master, but she was Queen, with a powerful and jealous sense of her royal prerogative, as well as the firm resolve of her royal uncles and her grandfather, George III. Albert, too, could be inflexible about principle. How much authority would he have over her? What authority would he bring to the monarchy? Could he rule the household while she ruled the nation? These were questions that the young couple was to wrestle with, at times with great tension, over the coming years.

On this day, Albert was away, at the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich, reviewing the Royal Artillery, leaving Victoria alone with Hayter. The subject for which she was posing offered the perfect occasion to consider how much things had changed over the past three years—and how much she had changed since she became Queen. Now, Albert was everything to her; but on the day she came to the throne, Victoria finally knew what it was to be
alone
, and
she relished the feeling. Victoria's childhood had been an unceasing struggle for personal autonomy and, with the death of her uncle King William IV, she had finally achieved it. Her childhood experience had instilled within her a hardened resolve that she would keep the monarchy entirely to herself.

She had been locked in that bitter battle for autonomy since before she could remember, and it had rendered her privileged childhood utterly miserable. Her father, the Duke of Kent, had died when she was eight months old, leaving her in a direct line of succession to the throne. If her three uncles George IV, Frederick Duke of York, and William Duke of Clarence did not bear any legitimate children, she would become Queen. Victoria's widowed mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, Duchess of Kent, inherited her husband's debts along with the general disdain her royal brothers-in-law had shown him: she was a foreigner and an outsider, and very much wished to return to Saxe-Coburg. Her brother Leopold persuaded her not to for her daughter's sake. She stayed, and found much needed support in the man the Duke of Kent called “my very intelligent factotum,” Sir John Conroy, late captain of His Majesty's army. Before long, Conroy, wildly ambitious, deeply unscrupulous, and with the tongue of an Iago, had rendered the Duchess wholly dependent upon him. As time passed, the likelihood of Victoria's becoming queen grew. George IV would never have another child with his estranged wife, Caroline, and was unlikely to remarry. The Duke of York resolved to remain unmarried and, in any case, died in 1828. The Duke of Clarence—who had ten illegitimate children—rested all of his hopes of an heir in his wife, Adelaide, who seemed unable to produce anything but stillbirths or sickly infants who soon died. George and William were by now old men, quite likely to die before Victoria had attained her majority. To Conroy, then, a glittering political prospect became more and more likely: he could rule Britain through the Duchess, who would almost certainly become Regent. That prospect became even more likely when, soon after the Duke of Clarence became King William
IV in 1830, the Duchess of Kent was legally designated Regent in the event that William died before Victoria's majority.