Shooting Victoria (25 page)

Rowan too must have been relieved to have corroboration for Albert's story. But the fact that it was a sixteen-year-old from Holborn who witnessed the attempt, and that the story had already been told a number of times, to a number of people, concerned him. Surely it would not be long until the story got out and spread through the metropolis like wildfire. If the attempted assassin
learned that he had been spotted, he would likely run for cover and might never be caught. Rowan, then, decided to intensify the search. He ordered his clerks to write up “as many written descriptions of the offender to be made out as there are entrances with St. James Park”—seventeen in all. Seventeen plain-clothed officers, each equipped with a bulletin, would stand, one at each gate, ready to seize anyone meeting the assailant's description. Rowan and Graham agreed that it was not necessary to tell these officers—or any of the other officers on patrol in the parks—
why
this man was wanted; besides the four inspectors, no police officer was told about the attempt on the Queen, or that her life was now in danger. For almost all of the police in the parks on this day, therefore, the mission was to protect St. James's Park, not to protect their monarch.

It then struck Rowan that George Pearson—who had stammered out his story and returned to Holborn—would be, as an eyewitness, of immeasurable help to the police. He sent Inspector Pearce to fetch him and accompany him around the parks.

Rowan operated under two assumptions in setting out his orders. First, he considered that the assassin would return to the exact scene of his first attempt, hoping to find the Queen there. In other words, Rowan thought it more likely that Francis would return to St. James's Park than that he would look for his opportunity in Green Park. True, he had directed officers on patrol to search both parks—but the dragnet he had established at St. James's had no counterpart at Green Park. Second, he had left the Palace the night before certain that Victoria would refrain from her afternoon ride for two days. He had not heard Victoria's own opinion, assuming that her husband and ministers would of course know what she wanted to do.

Rowan was wrong, utterly wrong, in both assumptions.

Victoria was unnerved by the attempt of the day before, and especially by the thought that one of her subjects, still at large, apparently sought to kill her. But she knew instinctively that hiding
in the Palace and letting one misfit intrude between her and her subjects, for days or longer, was not an option. Better to take on the threat directly than live under its shadow. She told Albert's secretary, George Anson, that she had had for some time a premonition that such a “mad attempt” would be made. It would be a relief to scotch the problem, by flushing out the shooter. Albert noted that, upon confirmation of Sunday's attempt, “we were naturally very much agitated, Victoria very nervous and unwell.” He indeed claims that a doctor recommended she deal with her agitation by going out. But that doctor (likely Dr. Clark) had no knowledge of the attempt, and it is not at all likely he recommended the Queen deal with her nerves by placing herself in the line of fire. It was Victoria who made the decision. She simply refused, under any circumstances, to jeopardize her well-cultured relationship with the public—one that depended upon her regularly going among her subjects. She had inherited a tarnished monarchy, her predecessors—through illness, disdain, or reclusiveness—secluding themselves from the public, inviting at best the apathy, and at worst the active dislike of the people. Victoria, as Princess and as Queen, had actively resisted seclusion, and had enhanced the reputation of the monarchy simply by demonstrating an absolute trust of her good relationship with her people. She refused to let any ill- or good-looking boy challenge that. Her openness signified a sea change in royal style—a sense of daily responsibility to the public that defines the British monarchy today. The public
expected
her to ride among them. She would not disappoint them. As for Albert, if he had known of the plan to keep the Queen at home, he now forgot or ignored it, and concurred with his wife's decision. They were determined to go out, he wrote to his father, “for we should have to
shut
ourselves up for months, had we settled not to go out, so long as the miscreant was at large.” Victoria rode out, she informed her Uncle Leopold, because she honestly felt she had no other option.

She would, however, take precautions. While continuing to keep yesterday's attempt from the household, she made it clear
that her ladies in waiting would not be needed or welcomed on this ride. “I must expose the lives of my gentlemen,” she wrote to her uncle, “but I will not those of my ladies.” Her lady in waiting, Lady Portman, and her maids of honor, Matilda Paget and Geor-giana Liddell, waited in vain that afternoon to be called; Liddell, thus shunned, stalked off to grumble in the palace gardens. The gentlemen whose lives Victoria exposed were her and Albert's equerries, Colonels Arbuthnot and Wylde, whom she instructed to ride as close to the open carriage as possible, in order to shield them from any bullets. She also ordered her postilion to drive the horses faster. Moreover, she and Albert possessed a touching faith in the police whom they had unknowingly misled: they knew that there were plenty of police in plain clothes in the parks: they were on the lookout for the assailant, and, as Albert thought, “would seize him on the least imprudence or carelessness on his part.”

Albert—who knew from his experience on Sunday that he was in as much danger as his wife—was the first to leave the Palace. He had an appointment at Somerset House, in one of his first official positions: as Lord Warden of the Stannaries. It was just the sort of involvement in political affairs that Albert craved; he wouldn't miss it for anything. At 3:00, he set out from the Palace. He returned before six—surely scrutinizing the assembling crowds more carefully than usual.

The weather was superb that evening, the sun still fairly high in the late May sky, when the carriage, preceded by outriders, followed by grooms, clattered out of the Palace gates. Racing up Constitution Hill, Victoria and Albert must have remembered Oxford's attempt, two years before, at this very spot. As they sped by, their equerries crowding so closely to them as to almost touch the sides of the carriage, the royal couple refrained from their usual greetings to the public, instead glancing around anxiously, watching for a pistol, straining to hear a shot. (Later, Victoria's visiting Uncle Mensdorff helpfully told her “one is sure not to have been hit when one hears the report, as one never hears it when one is hit.”) “Looking out
for such a man was not
des plus agreables
,” Victoria wrote. Albert concurred: “You may imagine that our minds were not very easy. We looked behind every tree, and I cast my eyes round in search of the rascal's face.” They sped up the hill and into Hyde Park without incident, and began to relax, finding comfort in the stunning weather and the appreciative “hosts of people on foot.” They rode into the suburbs as far north as Hampstead before turning back for the Palace.

Meanwhile back at Green Park on Constitution Hill, standing near a pump directly across the road from where Edward Oxford had fired his pistols, William Trounce, one of the many plainclothes constables patrolling the parks from A Division, thought he had found his man. He had been observing the youth for some time. The youth matched the description of the assailant. He stood alone. And he had been behaving strangely—pacing agitatedly about the pump. He realized Trounce was watching him, and resented it: “I had seen the prisoner half an hour before this,” Trounce later told authorities, “and when I looked at him he appeared to go behind the tree, as if to conceal himself”—peering out furtively, hoping in vain that the constable would lose interest in him. He only succeeded in increasing Trounce's suspicion. Trounce was right: he
was
observing John Francis, who, his pistol concealed in the breast of his coat, was waiting for the return of the royal couple. But Trounce, curiously, did nothing to detain Francis; he simply continued to observe him. True, Francis had done nothing wrong—yet. And while Trounce had been given a description of Francis, he had absolutely no idea that Francis had made an attempt on the Queen the day before, and thus had no idea that Francis posed a threat today to the royal couple, whose carriage was now rushing through the gate at Hyde Park and racing down Constitution Hill.

The carriage had been proceeding at the fast clip of eleven miles an hour, according to Victoria's equerry Arbuthnot. But Arbuthnot, feeling in his gut that something was wrong as they approached Constitution Hill, rode up to the postilion and demanded he ride
even faster until they reached the Palace gates. Trounce turned away from Francis, who now stood a yard downhill and behind him, in order to catch sight of the quickly approaching carriage, rushing up to a point six feet away from him. (He was later to speculate that the speed of the carriage saved the Queen's life.) Trounce now faced a dilemma. He had been a policeman for two years, but had only been with A Division for a month, and was unfamiliar with royal protection and etiquette. How was a police officer observing a suspect supposed to respond to the royal presence?

Trounce in that instant opted for loyalty over security. He stood at attention and smartly saluted the Queen as she passed.

The explosion in Trounce's ear completely disconcerted him for a moment. Then, turning, he saw to his horror Francis, his left hand resting on the pump, his right hand steady on his left, still pointing the discharged flintlock at where the Queen had been: a “theatrical attitude,” according to one of many witnesses who now focused absolutely upon him. Colonel Arbuthnot cried out “secure him!” but Trounce already had Francis by the collar with one hand, and had Francis's pistol in the other. The policeman was mortified by the fact that he had allowed Francis to get off a shot: “I did not intend to make any delay in seizing the Prisoner.… It was not as if I had seen him fire the Pistol—I could have then laid hold of him sooner, or if I had known he was going to fire it.…” he later sputtered guiltily in a police report.

The carriage moved on, Arbuthnot pulling up for a moment to see Francis captured before rejoining the Queen. Wylde meanwhile galloped from Albert's side toward Francis. Albert and Victoria, looking behind them, glimpsed a number of bystanders converging on Francis, before they turned and galloped through the Marble Arch and into the Palace yard.

A private in the Scots Fusilier Guards, Henry Allen, was the first to join Trounce in securing Francis. Allen had seen the flash from the pistol and heard the shot: there was a sharpness to the sound that convinced him that the pistol had indeed been loaded.
Other witnesses—Colonel Arbuthnot in particular—agreed that the pistol's report was sharp and loud, the sign “of a pistol well loaded and rammed.” Victoria, on the other hand, was certain that the shot was not loud at all—certainly, less loud than when Oxford had shot at her. She would not even have noticed it, she claimed, if she hadn't actually been expecting to hear it at some point during the ride. The
sound
of the shot became a central question at Francis's trial, sound suggesting substance—a loaded weapon. Another important question was where the bullet—if there was one—went. Albert was sure Francis aimed low, the bullet going under the carriage; others claimed it went above; one of the Queen's grooms, riding behind her, thought Francis actually aimed not at the Queen, but at the hind wheel of her carriage. In any case, a bullet was never found.

Inspector James Russell—who, as one of the inspectors assigned to palace duty, was one of the very few in the park that day who had actually known the Queen's life was in danger—ran up to Trounce and the others securing Francis. Trounce handed Russell the pistol; it was warm, suggesting recent discharge. The group marched Francis to the Porter's Lodge of the palace. There, he was searched: a little notebook, a key or two, a penny—and a small amount of gunpowder, screwed up in a piece of paper: enough to recharge his pistol. But he did not have any bullets. Wylde attempted to question him, but Francis remained sullen, silent and frightened—Wylde observed the quiver in his lips. Within minutes, they led Francis across the palace to the equerries' entrance, bundled him into a cab, drove him to the Gardiner Lane station, and shut him in the cell Oxford had occupied two years before. Meanwhile, two more carriages sped from the Palace—to inform the House of Commons and the House of Lords about the attempt.

At Gardiner Lane, Francis lost his anonymity. Two ex-colleagues from Covent Garden had coincidentally come to Green Park that evening and had witnessed the shooting. The two compared notes. One of these two, Mark Russell, nearly sure that the young man he
had seen was John Francis Senior's son, hurried to Gardiner Lane, where he identified Francis positively and provided police with the whereabouts of Francis's father. Inspector Pearce was quickly dispatched to fetch him. Francis admitted his identity.

Word of Francis's capture was sent around the building to Colonel Rowan, still in the process of giving orders to find the assailant of the day before; he was shocked to learn that the Queen had gone out at all, let alone that she was shot at.

The news quickly crossed the street and disrupted Parliament. In the Lords, the news was brought to the Duke of Wellington, then Leader of the House of Lords in Peel's government. Without a word, Wellington started up and rushed from the chamber, followed by the Lord Chancellor and a number of other peers; business was immediately suspended. In the Commons, the news could not have come at a more dramatic moment: the third (and final) reading of Peel's income-tax bill had just been proposed. The Home Secretary, hearing the news, called Peel from the house to tell him. Although Peel of course knew that an assailant was at large, he, like Rowan, thought that the Queen would be safe in the Palace all day and was shocked by the news. He returned to the House, which now, catching wind of the attempt, was in a state of “much inattention and confusion.” Peel interrupted a hapless M.P. attempting to continue the debate, and, in a voice in which his “excitement well nigh overpowered his utterance,” he informed the House of the attempt, the Queen's providential escape, and the capture of the would-be assassin, calling for immediate adjournment. Lord John Russell seconded, the motion passed, and Peel rushed from the House.