Shooting Victoria (27 page)

Francis himself attempted in Newgate to project the sense that his act had been little more than a frolic, but the persistence with which he repeatedly claimed “there was no ball in the pistol; it only flashed in the pan” to warders, to the governor, to reporters, belied his anxiety about the enormity of the penalty he faced, if not of the crime itself. Still, he was hopeful: surely, everyone knew he could not have harmed the Queen, since his gun was not loaded?

The fact that this was the second attempt on the Queen's life in as many years made the motivation of these young assailants an urgent question. Many were completely perplexed: Victoria's youth, her virtue, her gender should guarantee her freedom from any attempt on her life. But a consensus was building. The reports of Oxford's comfortable confinement were well known, and appeared to most to be a reward of sorts, as freedom from the hardship of poverty and “the disagreeable condition of perpetually collecting pewter pots.” It seemed obvious that Francis wished for what Oxford had—a life of ease at the Queen's pleasure. The crowd that formed outside Buckingham Palace on the night of the attempt agreed, claiming (according to an eavesdropping policeman) that “his only motive could be like Oxford to ensure a situation for life.” On hearing of Francis's attempt, Oxford himself claimed that “If they had hanged me, there would have been nothing of the kind again.” But there was more to it than this. The instant fame he gained from the attempt was just as important to Oxford as it was to his imitator, Francis. A writer in the
Examiner
described the thrill that these boys experienced in being charged and tried for High Treason. The procedure “flatters the diseased appetite for
éclat
and notoriety which prompted Oxford's attempt, and has probably also been one of the motives of Francis—messengers hurrying hither and thither in search of Ministers—the pomp and circumstance of examination before the Privy Council, instead of the quiet undramatic course of an examination in the nearest dingy police-office before the sort of magistrate who is the habitual terror of the sort of prisoner.” As long as assailants were treated as the chief players in “State pageants,” this sort of crime would happen again; the law as it stood was an encouragement, not a deterrent, to the crime.

But that was the law; the government had no other option than to try Francis for High Treason. His trial was scheduled for Friday 17 June. Thomas Cooper, now in Newgate's infirmary suffering from the effects of the poison he had taken, would face trial the next day, the eighteenth.

Both Francis's defense and his prosecution prepared their cases with Oxford's trial in mind. Francis's barrister William Clarkson, a hardheaded, “rough, bluff, testy personage,” had no intention of mounting an insanity defense. Public anger at Oxford's sentence, rekindled by Francis's attempt, made it unlikely that any jury would acquit Francis for that reason, even if the defense could succeed at the difficult task of finding witnesses to testify to mad behavior on Francis's part. Moreover, Oxford's acquittal for insanity had ironically resulted in what amounted to imprisonment for life. If Sydney Taylor had forgone an insanity plea and simply argued that Oxford's pistols were not loaded, Oxford would almost certainly have walked from the Old Bailey a free man. Taylor's two-pronged defense only confused the jury and resulted in a muddled verdict. In Francis's case, there was no substantial evidence that his flintlock was loaded. Clarkson would concede that Francis bought a gun, that he pulled it out on the Mall on Sunday, and that he presented it and fired it, without ball, on Constitution Hill on Monday. He would produce no witnesses to counter these facts; rather, he would oppose the prosecution's attempts to suggest that the gun was loaded. If Francis had no bullets in his gun, Clarkson would argue, he could not have intended to harm the Queen. Therefore, Francis's public disturbance was certainly illegal, and prosecutable as a lesser charge, but it did not amount to High Treason. His entire case, then, would hinge upon the claim that Francis had had only powder and wadding in his pistol.

The prosecution was formidable, composed of Attorney General Frederick Pollock (who had helped prosecute Oxford), Solicitor General William Webb Follett, and three others. They must have been delighted to learn that Clarkson had no intention of arguing insanity. Two years before, an insanity verdict and detention at the Queen's pleasure seemed a victory of sorts for the government. But the general sense that Oxford had improved his life by committal to Bethlem, and the prevailing belief that his committal positively incited malcontents to attack the Queen, would now render that outcome the worst of defeats.

They were well aware that the weak link to their case was a lack of hard proof that Francis's gun had been loaded. Despite their strenuous efforts, the police had not found any shopkeeper in London who had sold Francis bullets. No spent bullet was found after the attempt, and even though Francis had fired at the Queen from seven feet away, no bullet had done damage to her, her equerry, his horse, or her carriage. They planned two strategies to deal with this weak link. First they would introduce evidence that the
sound
of Francis's shot suggested that his gun was loaded. Second, they would argue that it was not at all necessary to prove that Francis's gun was loaded: even if it wasn't, he was
still
guilty of High Treason.

To this end, the government very carefully articulated the indictment against Francis, breaking it down into eight counts. Four held that Francis did “compass, imagine, devise, and intend” to kill the Queen; four held that he endangered her life. And each of these charges consisted of four counts—differing in degree, but still amounting to High Treason. Count 1 held that Francis's gun contained gunpowder and a bullet; count 2 held that it contained gunpowder and “certain other destructive materials and substances unknown”; count 3 held that Francis fired a loaded pistol; and count 4 held that Francis simply fired a pistol. Arguably, by that last count, Francis could be found guilty for High Treason simply by firing an unloaded weapon at the Queen. Clarkson's strategy was to argue that the evidence did not reach the high bar set for High Treason. The prosecution's strategy was to lower the bar.

John Francis was placed in the dock of the Old Bailey on the morning of 18 June, well dressed in a black suit, to viewers discernibly handsome—and deeply anxious. Two weeks of jailers' and visitors' disappointingly impassive responses to his claims that his gun was unloaded, and that he had no intention to harm the Queen, had destroyed the “most perfect
sang froid
” with which he had entered Newgate. And since there was to be no insanity defense, he knew he would not be sharing Oxford's enviable fate, whatever
happened. Outside, huge crowds pressed to enter the courtroom. But the sheriffs only admitted those with written orders: the room was full but not uncomfortably so. Francis was far less concerned than Oxford had been at the quality of his audience: his attention from the start was fixed on his own barrister, William Clarkson, on the three judges above him, led by Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and upon the five prosecutors who sought his life. He bowed respectfully to the court, and was read the elaborate charges against him. “Not Guilty,” he said, in a low voice.

Attorney General Pollock laid out the prosecution's case. After describing the assault and praising the Queen's bravery, he focused on the fact that no bullet was found. Was that really surprising? Any number of materials could substitute for a lead bullet, he argued: “A child's marble—why, gentlemen, the very gravel path he was treading might have furnished him with a stone smooth or angular, quite adequate to the purpose in view.” Demanding the proof that a bullet existed to prove an attack, moreover, defied simple common sense. “Why, gentlemen,” he said to the jury, “put the case for yourself; make it for a moment your own. If at some distance from a wife or sister of your own you were to perceive a stranger deliberately aim firearms at the object of your regard, and were to see that succeeded by the discharge of a pistol or a gun, and you had to advance to seize the assassin, as you would deem him, and he were to turn round and quietly say, ‘Before you take me into custody I beg you will show that I had a bullet in that pistol I have just discharged,' what would you think?” They had the evidence of the act—and the act itself demonstrated his intent to harm the Queen.

Then came the witnesses, who established that Francis bought gun, flint, and powder, and that he was the one on Constitution Hill who fired a pistol at the Queen's carriage as it drove by. None of this evidence was surprising. But one witness was. Young George Pearson, brought forward as the only witness who could testify to
Francis's first attempt, astonished all who had heard him stutter badly through his account two weeks before: now he spoke fluidly, unhaltingly: for the last two weeks he had been taken in hand by a creator and purveyor of a treatment for stammering, Thomas Hunt, and apparently cured.
*

The defense contested nothing, except for any testimony suggesting that Francis fired directly at the Queen, or that his gun was loaded. In response to two witnesses who claimed the former, Clarkson called a witness from the prosecution's list who maintained Francis had aimed at the hind wheels of the Queen's carriage. When the second witness, Henry Allen of the Coldstream Guards (the soldier who grabbed Francis immediately after Trounce did) pronounced his opinion that the sound of Francis's shot was consistent with a loaded gun (“a piece fired off with ball sounds somewhat sharper than blank cartridge”), Clarkson in cross-examination chipped away at his ballistics expertise: he was a private; he had been in the army for only a year and on drill for three or four months; he was a tailor before he joined the army. When Chief Justice Tindal recalled the first witness, the Queen's Equerry Arbuthnot, to establish that he, too, thought the pistol was loaded, Clarkson pressed him to the point of retraction: it may or may not have been loaded, but in any case the powder was “well rammed down.”

At this point, the Chief Justice introduced an idea that essentially destroyed Francis's defense. “Now,” he asked Arbuthnot, “what I want to know is, whether a pistol fired from the spot where the prisoner stood, if only loaded with wadding, would cause injury to the Queen?” Arbuthnot's “decided opinion” was that it would. Attorney General Pollock quickly took the hint, and elicited from another military witness—Albert's equerry, Colonel Wylde—the possible fatal properties of paper wadding, fired at very close range: “At seven to nine feet the wadding of the pistol would wound the
skin or any exposed part, such as the face, or set fire to the dress.” Clarkson must have realized to his growing dismay that his central claim—that the gun was empty
except
for powder and wadding—would quite possibly not win this case.

Clarkson called no witnesses of his own. He argued that all of the facts established by the prosecution indeed established that a crime had taken place—but not the crime with which he was charged. Edward Oxford's motive was to gratify “morbid feeling and wretched vanity” by attaining notoriety. He became “ten times better off than he was before he committed the act.” Isn't it likely that Francis had no intention whatsoever to harm the Queen, but rather “hoped to render himself notorious in the eyes of the people, and to make himself an important personage, and also to better his condition?” Certainly, he deserved punishment for that—but punishment in another court, under another charge: his act did not amount to High Treason. As for the notion of lethal wadding, Clarkson had nothing to say beyond the nebulous, baffled, and baffling “I know that the books state, and so do my learned friends, that you must give evidence of the pistols being loaded beyond powder and wadding.”

The Solicitor General, responding to Clarkson's speech, argued that it was impossible to be certain about motives in this case. It was necessary to consider the act itself. And everything about Francis's act suggested an attempt to harm the Queen.

Judge Tindal, in summing up, returned to the wadding, pronouncing that its existence in the pistol alone was enough to establish guilt. “
…
though there were no ball or destructive materials,” he instructed the jury, “yet there might have been powder and wadding, which being fired off so close to the Royal person must have been intended to do bodily harm as the necessary consequence.” If the jury believed this to be the case, then they must find Francis guilty on the third count. Twice more before finishing his summation, Tindal brought up the wadding.

He finished at 4:29. The jury conferred for a moment and asked leave to discuss the verdict in private. They withdrew; Francis was
removed from the court. Clarkson then objected vociferously to Tindal's instructions to the jury, and his repeated emphasis upon the wadding. The charge against Francis was that he attacked the Queen intending to endanger her life: and the fact that there was a piece of paper to hold the powder in Francis's pistol surely did not suggest that intent.

The jury returned half an hour later, and Francis was brought back, breathing heavily and “very much agitated.” They had a verdict—and, like Oxford's verdict, it was muddled. The foreman said “we find the prisoner Guilty on the second and third counts. We think there is a doubt on the first.…” The second count suggested (if it didn't explicitly hold) that there was something more than powder and wadding in the pistol. The third did not. The initial verdict, then, pointed to some disagreement or confusion on the part of the jury. Judge Tindal thus pressed the foreman for clarity. Did the jury find the prisoner guilty on the first count? No. On the second? Yes. “You think the pistol was loaded with something more than the wadding—with some other destructive substance?” “Yes, my Lord.” The verdict was recorded: guilty of High Treason—specifically of firing a pistol containing “destructive materials and substances” at the Queen. That verdict, according to a court reporter, “rendered Mr. Clarkson's objection immaterial.” Not quite. Whether all of the jury agreed on both the second and third counts is unclear. And what the “destructive materials” besides wadding might be, and what evidence led the jury to that conclusion, is hard to imagine. Quite possibly, the paper stuffed in his flintlock ensured Francis's guilt.