Shooting Victoria (33 page)

*
On the other hand, he might have been unnaturally short even without the spinal curvature. Estimates of John Bean's height varied considerably—from 3'6” to 5'6”. The most careful estimate may have been by an eyewitness to Bean's naked body, who claimed Bean's scoliosis rendered his height 3'6” when he would otherwise stand at 4'6”, making him a hunchback
and
a dwarf, in the cruel vernacular of the day.

*
Interestingly,
The Old Curiosity Shop
may be the one work of literature to contain a portrait of one of Victoria's would–be assassins: in chapter 28 the illustrator of that novel, Hablôt K. Browne—”Phiz”—anachronistically but unmistakably places a beerpot-and flintlock-toting Edward Oxford among Mrs. Jarley's waxwork figures (Dickens,
Old Curiosity Shop
284).

*
Partridge was the officer on duty two years before when Edward Oxford was brought to A Division station house.

*
Three thousand, according to the
Times
.

*
The inclusion in the 1851 census of a 27-year-old cabman by the name of John Oxman suggests that this seeming alias was nothing of the kind.

*
Fieschi is usually considered the first of Louis-Philippe's would-be assassins. But three years before, in November 1832, the King was shot at and the shooter never found.

*
It was under this Act in 1981 that Marcus Sergeant was prosecuted for firing six blanks at Victoria's great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth.

*
Horry was Thomas Cooper's attorney as well.

*
“Bospher” in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey.

thirteen

T
ORY
S
PIES

F
our days after John William Bean's trial, on Monday 29 August, the
Royal George
set out of Woolwich in the pouring rain, towed by two steamships. Victoria and Albert were off to Scotland in spite of—and now in part because of—the disturbances across Britain. Besides a short visit by George IV in 1822, no British monarch had set foot in Scotland since the mid-1600s; indeed, Victoria would be the first reigning Queen of Scotland to be there since Mary Queen of Scots. The royal couple planned to put into practice the lessons John Conroy had taught Princess Victoria, enhancing the Queen's prestige through two grueling weeks of processionals between and within the cities of southern Scotland, mingling with all social classes: with cheering crowds by day, and with the elite by night as they stayed at their castles and estates.

The voyage began inauspiciously as bad weather forced the steamships to tow the yacht most of the way up the coast, the royal
couple spending much of the time belowdecks, ill. (The fact that Victoria was unknowingly three weeks pregnant with her third child could not have helped.) They arrived off Edinburgh a day after they were expected, letting down the thousands who had the day before trooped from miles around into the city, cramming the scaffolding along the planned procession route in vain expectation of seeing the Queen. Early the next morning, the royal procession shot through the city on the way to Dalkeith Palace, without sufficient warning to the public and before city dignitaries had assembled. Edinburgh's enthusiasm soured into disappointment. The town council and the royal party quickly improvised another procession through the city the next day. It was a rousing success—the first of many. “Scotland has rarely seen a prouder day—perhaps never,” wrote the
Times
. Massive crowds showered adulation upon the royal couple. Robert Peel rode in the carriage behind, fretting about the complete lack of security. “The crowds of persons were beyond description,” he wrote to his wife. “The mob was close to the carriage, from the narrowness of the streets, and every window in every house looking down into the carriages.” The Chartists who ran hooting and groaning beside him added to his anxiety.

Peel had every reason to worry. Somewhere on this route—or in the crowd for one or more of the next fortnight's processions—a man with an overwhelming urge to kill was watching and awaiting his opportunity. He had been for much of the last two years living in London, but he was a native of Glasgow, and had returned home ahead of the royal visit. At the beginning of August, in Paisley—incidentally one of Britain's worst-suffering towns, that hungry summer—he had bought two mismatched percussion-cap pistols. His target would be prominent within the royal processions. But the first carriage, the open phaeton behind the six mounted Royal Dragoons clearing the path, the one carrying Victoria and Albert, was only a distraction to him. It was a carriage further behind this that he was looking for—one clearly marked with the crest of two lions holding a shield marked “Industria”: Robert Peel's carriage.
Daniel McNaughtan saw the carriage, saw one man in it—and committed that man's face to memory.

The face, however, did not belong to Robert Peel. During the Edinburgh procession, and on many more during the next fortnight, Peel rode directly behind the royal couple in the carriage of his Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen. He left his secretary, Edward Drummond, to ride by himself in the Peel family carriage. Drummond later joked about his being taken for “a great man” in Scotland. He didn't look like Peel, but the two were roughly the same age. Because the illustrated press was in its infancy, images of even highly public figures such as Peel were rare. It was an easy mistake to make. Daniel McNaughtan made it.

Daniel McNaughtan knew that he could find release from his torment only by destroying Peel. The oppressive persecution he suffered had grown for years. It began, he was sure, with the priests of the local Catholic chapel, who tormented him with the assistance of a parcel of Jesuits. But then, he knew, the Tories joined in and soon became his chief tormentors. Their enmity toward him should perhaps not have been surprising, given his enmity toward them. Until 1841, he had been a very successful craftsman, amassing a small fortune as a wood-turner in Glasgow, and politics were a part of his life; as it happens, one of Glasgow's leading Chartists worked as a journeyman in his shop. But at some point—after he voted publicly against them, he claimed—the personal enmity that the Tories of Glasgow bore toward him alone grew to cosmic proportions. Day and night, Tory spies followed him. On the street, they glowered and laughed at him, furiously shaking their fists and their walking sticks in his face. One man repeatedly threw straw at him. His enemies never talked to him, instead communicating with signs. He knew what the straw meant: they intended to reduce him to sleeping on straw in an asylum. They inserted beastly, atrocious libels about him in the
Glasgow Herald
and the London
Times
; they poisoned his food. When he went to bed, they followed him and would not let him sleep. They intended to destroy his peace
of mind, drive him to consumption; they would not stop until he was dead.

His enemies were inhabitants of Glasgow, and so he repeatedly sought relief from the authorities of that city. When his father could not help him, he went in turn to the sheriff, the Procurator-Fiscal (or Glasgow's public prosecutor), the Commissioner of Police, the Lord Provost, and even to his Member of Parliament. All of them considered him delusional—and could do nothing to help him. When McNaughtan tracked down his M.P., Alexander Johnson, in London, Johnson fended him off with a curt note sent from the Reform Club: “I can do nothing for you. I fear you are labouring under an aberration of mind.” When civil authority failed him, he looked to the divine, begging his father's minister Rev. Mr. Turner for help. The Reverend could do nothing except what the Lord Provost had done—call upon McNaughtan's father and advise him to put his lunatic son in restraints. But Daniel McNaughtan Senior refused, thinking that his son's delusions would pass.

McNaughtan realized that he would have to act for himself. He fled Scotland for London, but to his great dismay his persecutors followed him. He twice fled abroad, but it was no use: the instant he set foot on the quay at Boulogne, he could see one of them scowling at him from behind the custom-house watchbox. Flight was impossible. He would have to stop his tormentors by killing their leader. And so he returned to Scotland and waited for his opportunity to kill the man as he toured the country with the Queen. For some reason, he did not shoot at the man in Peel's carriage. Accordingly, two or three weeks after the Queen's Scottish tour, McNaughtan followed Peel to London, taking the steamship
Fire King
from Glasgow to Liverpool—where the ubiquitous spies beset him particularly mercilessly. In London, McNaughtan tried for a couple months to find a living in spite of the Tories, seeking work and seeking a partner with whom to invest the £750 he had earned from his wood-turning business. At the beginning of 1843,
however, the oppression reached the breaking point; he gave up all else in order to stalk his arch-oppressor, Peel.

He took up his post in the heart of Tory darkness: the streets outside of Whitehall, standing all day for two weeks on the steps leading to the Privy Council office. Two recruiters from the army saw him there and asked if he'd like to enlist. No, he told them: he was simply waiting to see a gentleman. Two policemen from A Division—including P.C. Partridge
*
—took note of him; one told him that those inside the Privy Council office did not like his loitering there. “Tell them their property is quite safe,” he replied.

His obsessive urge to kill was matched by an obsessive need to kill the right man. The Prime Minister's official residence was, then as now, 10 Downing Street, but Robert Peel actually resided in his London mansion, Whitehall Gardens, conveniently located directly across from Downing Street, and observable from McNaughtan's position. Edward Drummond had rooms at 10 Downing Street, and his business took him back and forth between the residences, often several times a day. McNaughtan watched him come and go—the man
had to be
Peel. To be absolutely sure, he twice pointed Drummond out to a police constable, asking if that man was Robert Peel. Both times, the constable said yes, thinking McNaughtan was pointing to the man then walking
next
to Drummond: Robert Peel.

On the twentieth of January, McNaughtan, aware of the growing alarm he was causing the Tories and the police around him, came down the steps and shadowed Drummond, who walked from Downing Street to Charing Cross and entered Drummond's bank. (It belonged to his brother.) A few minutes later, Drummond emerged and walked back toward Downing Street. McNaughtan followed. Between the Admiralty and the Horse Guards, McNaughtan walked up to Drummond's back, pulled one of his pistols from the breast of his coat and fired, so close to his victim that Drummond's
jacket caught fire. He thrust the pistol back into his coat and reached for the other one. Constable James Silver, standing next to the two, was upon McNaughtan an instant after the first shot. The two struggled violently before Silver knocked up McNaughtan's arm and kicked his legs from beneath him. McNaughtan fired the second pistol into the air.

Drummond, clutching at his back, staggered back into his brother's bank. Although the bullet had nearly traveled through his body, he seemed relatively uninjured; initial reports of his condition were extremely optimistic. An apothecary was sent for and deemed him fit to travel to the family house on Grosvenor Street, where doctors were called in, and the bullet was removed. Drummond lingered for five days, while the best doctors in town finished what the bullet had started, leeching and bleeding him relentlessly as his wound grew more infected. On 25 January, he died.

P.C. Silver marched McNaughtan to the Gardiner Lane station house. On the way there McNaughtan muttered that “he” or “she” (Silver could not tell which) “shall not break my peace of mind any longer.” Placed in the same cell that Oxford, Francis, and Bean had occupied before him, he spent several hours certain that he had wounded if not killed Sir Robert Peel. It was not until eight or nine the next morning that Inspector John Tierney, interviewing him, realized that McNaughtan had shot the wrong man. “I suppose you are aware who the gentleman is you shot at?” Tierney asked him. “It is Sir
Robert Peel
, is it not?” McNaughtan replied, growing agitated. “No,” the inspector at first replied, but then, not wanting to force a confession, said “we don't exactly know who the gentleman is yet.” Later that day, at his examination at Bow Street, McNaughtan learned the truth: to his great horror, his persecutors had triumphed.

“The evidence of his mental delusion is strong,” Peel wrote to Victoria of McNaughtan on the day Drummond died, and it soon became clear that he would plead insanity. The prospect of an
acquittal for insanity pleased no one, certainly not the Queen. McNaughtan, like Edward Oxford, had acted with such deliberation: how could he not be held responsible for his act? “There is and should be,” she wrote to Peel, “a difference between that madness which is such that a man knows not what he does, and madness which does not prevent a man from purposely buying pistols, and then with determined purpose watching and shooting a person.” Deliberation, in other words, demonstrates awareness, and awareness implies guilt.

More than this, an acquittal of any kind would completely remove any deterrent value from the sentence. The connection between the three attempts upon the Queen and the murder of Drummond was by now obvious to all. “Who can doubt but that Bellingham was as insane as Oxford?” exclaimed a writer in the
Times
, thinking back to the quick execution of Spencer Perceval's assassin in 1812. “But, after the execution of the former, he had no imitators: would that we could say as much after the pardon of the latter!” An insanity acquittal would only perpetuate the outrages and the Queen would remain in danger. Home Secretary Graham, preparing the case against McNaughtan, was adamant that he be convicted. “Every preparation is in progress to meet this vague and dangerous excuse,” he wrote Victoria. He had grounds for hope: word had reached him from Scotland that a case could be made that he was a coldhearted, violent Chartist. That lead petered out, however, and no evidence of this kind was presented at McNaughtan's trial.