Shooting Victoria (38 page)

The royal carriage was not far behind. Cheering recommenced up the road, and the Queen's outriders trotted into view. Then, the carriage. Hamilton strode up to the palings and spoke to both the woman and to a muscular man on the other side of the fence. “Is that the Queen?” Both assented and turned to watch the carriage rush past. “All right,” Hamilton muttered. He immediately reached into his coat for the pistol, thrust it through the palings alongside the muscular man's face—and fired with a loud roar and a plume of smoke. The man, deafened, felt something whizz past his ear and realized his face was scorched. He believed Hamilton's gun had been loaded with a bullet.

Sergeant-footman Robert Renwick, sitting in a rumble seat behind the Queen, saw Hamilton point the gun—and immediately called out to the postilions to stop the carriage—giving Hamilton a clearer target. Amazingly, they were obeying just as Hamilton fired. Victoria stood up and gazed in the direction of the shot. “Renwick,” she said, “what is that?”

“Your Majesty has been shot at.”

Victoria sat down and ordered the carriage to move on. Her equerry Wemyss excitedly did the same thing, and then reeled his horse about and trotted into the Park to supervise Hamilton's arrest. Victoria, seemingly unperturbed, pacified Alfred, Alice, and Helena—who, from their position, had had an excellent view of the shooting. Within seconds, the carriage disappeared through the palace gates. Albert, who had heard the pistol-crack, agitatedly met his family at the steps of the Palace: “Thank God,” he said to Victoria, “you are safe.”

As it happens, George Moulder, Green Park's head park-keeper, had been standing just twelve yards from Hamilton as the Queen passed; he had seen everything. He instantly fell upon Hamilton, who was frantically trying to return the pistol to his coat pocket. Moulder grabbed him by the right arm and collar, but feared that he had another pistol and cried out for the man on the other side of the fence—the startled, singed, muscular man, whose name was Daniel Lamb—to seize him as well. Lamb seemed to Moulder to do nothing. Lamb's abnormal strength (he had the quaint occupation—considered unusual even then—of a “running huntsman,” actually running barefoot along with the hounds during fox hunts) was useless to him in this situation, as Hamilton stood too far away on the other side of the palings. All Lamb could do was clutch at the fringe of Hamilton's coat. A police constable named Topley, and a private in the Life Guards, then vaulted the palings and secured an agitated but unresisting Hamilton.

While everyone in the crowd had heard the booming gunshot, very few had actually seen that the Queen was unharmed, and the great majority jumped to the conclusion that she had been hit—had been grievously wounded—had even been killed. “Secure him,” several shouted, “he has murdered the Queen!” A hostile mass quickly converged upon a now-frightened Hamilton, crying “tear him to pieces!” and chanting “kill him at once; kill him at once!” A middle-aged man raised his fist to him, intent upon “inflicting
summary punishment”; the Queen's equerry William Wemyss restrained him. The several police on patrol around the palace who had run up to seize Hamilton suddenly found themselves his protectors, fending off a growing lynch mob. One constable ran to fetch a hackney cab while the others herded Hamilton through a wicket and onto the road. A policeman who had wrestled the pistol away from Hamilton gave it to the Queen's equerry. Wemyss by this time was already certain that there had been no bullet in the pistol—if there had been, he was sure he would have been hit. One sniff at the barrel confirmed that this was the gun that had fired. But he was certain that the sound of a loaded pistol would have been different.

The hackney cab wheeled up and Hamilton was quickly bundled inside; William Walker, inspector on duty at the Palace, and other police climbed in. With Wemyss riding by their side, they brought Hamilton to A Division station house. On the way there, Hamilton betrayed none of the exhilaration that Oxford and Francis had had upon their capture; he endured rather than enjoyed public attention.

When they arrived at the station house, the commissioners were summoned, and Hamilton was soon placed in the police dock to be questioned, along with several witnesses to the shooting, by Mayne as well as Superintendent May. The attention only seemed to depress him, as he leaned on the dock with his head in his hands. In response to questioning, he was momentarily uncommunicative, at first refusing to state his name and address. He soon gave in and spoke, with a thick brogue: his name was William Hamilton
*
, aged twenty-four—an Irishman from Adare, County Limerick; he was an out-of-work bricklayer's laborer. He had acted as he did because he was poor. No one else was involved: he had no friends or relatives in this country.

Park-keeper Moulder and others then identified him as the man who had shot at the Queen. Whether the gun was loaded or not—whether Hamilton was to be tried for High Treason or for the High Misdemeanour of annoying the public and the Queen—would be left for the Home Office to decide. Hamilton was remanded to be examined in Whitehall the next day, with all the witnesses bound over to appear there. He was then brought to the cell previously inhabited by Oxford, Francis, and Bean.

Inspector Charles Otway (the man who had entrapped Gould, and had been a sergeant in A Division when Oxford was arrested) hurried to Eccleston Place and discovered the depth of Hamilton's penury. There was nothing in his room besides two sheets lent him by his landlady and a few scribbled-upon sheets of paper—with nothing in them about shooting the Queen. Finding nothing material to the case, Otway returned to the station and interviewed Hamilton directly. Hamilton told him about his long bout of unemployment; about his journey to France at the time of Louis Napoleon's escape; about his work on the French railways—and about his motive. His pistol contained only powder and he had not had the slightest intention of hurting the Queen. “He said he did it for the purpose of getting into prison, as he was tired of being out of work.”

By this time, the ministers' celebratory dinners for the Queen were in full swing, and messengers were sent from the Palace to interrupt the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister with the news. Home Secretary George Grey sent to the Home Office, arranging for an examination there at two the next day, and sending word to the commissioners to be present. This examination would be more subdued than the previous ones: not a spectacular convening of the Cabinet, but largely limited to the Home Office and the police. That Grey did not schedule an examination that night demonstrates that from the start he was unwilling to accord Hamilton the notoriety accorded Hamilton's predecessors. (He did, however, send word to A Division that Hamilton be placed
on suicide watch.) Grey then hurried to the Palace—as did Prime Minister John Russell.

The reaction to the attempt was predictable: the elite hastening in their carriages to the Palace to inquire after the Queen's health, the raucous celebration at the operas and the plays, the swelling crowds surrounding the palace—but this time, the public celebrations took on a greater intensity, growing out of the many celebrations already underway. At the clubs, and at ministerial dinners, the Queen's health was drunk with three times three; outside, on Pall Mall, along Regent Street, and on the Great Mall between St. James's and Buckingham Palace, crowds cried out “Long live the Queen” and spontaneously burst into the national anthem. Jubilation at the Queen's escape only intensified the illuminations later that night. “Altogether,” the
Times
reported, “the routine of a Royal birthday received a vast and visible stimulus from the impulse of public sympathy.”

The next day, Victoria wrote to her Uncle Leopold that “the indignation, loyalty, and affection this act has called forth is very gratifying and touching”—just as it had been three times before. And yet, the Queen knew, something about Hamilton's attempt was completely different. Hamilton's attempt was, as everyone seemed to realize from the first—not really an attempt at all. His pistol was almost certainly unloaded with any sort of projectile. The police searched the area exhaustively for a bullet and turned up nothing. At the royal stables, the carriage was scrutinized for marks; none were found. The Queen's equerry Wemyss, who was positive that if there had been a bullet, he or his horse would have been hit, was unscathed. And a thorough search of Hamilton produced a small amount of gunpowder, the head of a pipe, and a few halfpence, but no bullet. Much the same had been the case with Oxford, Francis, and Bean. But with the first two there was no question that treason was afoot and the pistols were loaded. Even with Bean those were at first distinct possibilities. In Hamilton's case, on the
other hand—after the initial attempt to lynch him by the angry crowd—the idea that he might have intended to injure or kill the queen was universally and repeatedly denied. His was the perfect case to be tried under Robert Peel's Security and Protection of Her Majesty's Person Act, and everyone hoped he'd find his punishment at the wrong end of a whip rather than a rope.

Victoria was certain from the start that Hamilton had had no intention of killing her, writing to Leopold “I hope that you will not have been alarmed by the account of the occurrence which took place on Saturday, and which I can assure you did
not
alarm
me
at all.
This
time it is quite clear that it was a wanton and wicked wish merely to
frighten
, which is very wrong, and will be tried and punished as a
misdemeanour.
” In the Sunday newspapers the day after the shooting, Hamilton's attempt was designated an “absurdity,” “an exasperating piece of folly,” not worthy of consideration as a capital crime: “The man who commits such an act in this country should be flogged at the cart's tail, for hanging would be treating him with too much consideration.” On Monday, the
Daily News
, though it acknowledged the wickedness of pointing a pistol at “a person every way so sacred, in domestic as in political life, as that of her Majesty,” noted that at least there “will not be found superadded the heinousness of a really murderous motive” to the act. In the House of Commons that same day, Lord John Russell agreed, claiming that “it has been found that there is no reason to accuse the person who discharged the pistol of a treasonable attempt, and that it is a crime more remarkable for its baseness than its atrocity.”

Given the extremely turbulent times through which Britain and Europe were passing, the haste at which virtually everyone disregarded Hamilton as a threat seems on the surface surprising. The fact that Hamilton was from Ireland, a country still starving and defeated in May 1849, would appear to provide him with an obvious political motive for striking out against the British government by harming the Queen. But the papers hurried to disabuse readers of
this interpretation. “The accident, or the fact, of the man Hamilton's being an Irishman may be made the theme of animadversion, and conclusions may be drawn from it of the international hate or savage vindictiveness of the Celt,” wrote the
Daily News
. But “the Irish elements which have contributed to his crime, will probably be found more those of poverty and vanity, than any thing more peculiarly malignant or Celtic.”

The Irish newspapers were particularly adamant in asserting that Hamilton had no intention of killing the Queen. One attempted to claim that Hamilton might not be Irish at all. Others scrambled to prove that while he might be Irish, he could not be from
their
corner of the island. The
Limerick Chronicle
investigated and found that though Hamilton claimed to be from Adare, he had no relatives there. A further report allowed that he had worked on a farm near Adare and assisted at a shop in town, but that Cork, not Adare, was responsible for him: “Hamilton was a native of Cork, and no relative of any persons at or near Adare.” The
Cork Constitution
quickly responded with a letter from the secretaries of the Cork Orphan Asylum denying that anyone named William Hamilton had passed through there. (They were probably correct, as they were apparently officials of the larger
Catholic
Orphan Asylum, not the smaller Protestant Asylum from which Hamilton came.) “The Corkonians are most anxious to disclaim having reared the fellow who fired at the Queen,” wrote a journalist reporting the squabble. In tossing his origins around like a hot potato, the Irish appeared one and all eager to deny any connection between Hamilton and them—and eager to dissociate him from any Irish cause.

Then, there was a second possibility: that Hamilton might be the last gasp of revolutionary activity in England. This was also vehemently denied by both the press and the politicians. One editorialist, wilfully forgetting the recent past, declared absolutely that “fortunately there are no recent event [sic] which could afford political colour or excitement to a crime of this kind. Never was the country more tranquil or the parliamentary session more dull.”
At a grand dinner at Mansion House Monday evening, the Lord Mayor, toasting the Queen, deplored Hamilton's act, but denied it could have been political, because such a revolutionary political act was simply impossible in Britain. “At a time when the all the continental nations are struggling in political convulsions,” he said, “this country enjoys a complete immunity from any of those dreadful conflicts to which the rest of Europe is subjected.”

Hamilton's shooting threatened to resurrect some of the uglier incidents of the recent past. The British collectively refused to let that happen. His was the most quickly forgotten attempt. Before three days had passed, he was already a fading memory to Victoria and Albert as they traveled with the children to their haven at Osborne.

And yet, three-year-old Princess Helena saw it all and knew what must happen next, stating after she witnessed the attempt “Man shot, tried to shoot dear Mamma, must be punished.”
How
he would be punished was the question. The day after the shooting—Sunday the twenty-second—he was examined at the Home Office, brought there between Superintendent May and Inspector Otway. At first he appeared affronted to be there, but within seconds was reduced to trembling before Home Secretary Grey. The Attorney General, John Jervis, examined witnesses for three hours until Grey came to the conclusion that everyone had already reached: Hamilton's pistol was not loaded, and he had meant to annoy the Queen, not to kill her. All of the O'Keefes—Daniel, Bridget, and young Edward—testified, but Hamilton's mysterious young protectress in the milk line was nowhere to be seen. Edward O'Keefe could not let his meeting with Hamilton pass without paying his debt: while testifying he displayed the tea-spout bound to the chunk of wood, and, producing a penny, he turned to the prisoner. “Here, Mr. Hamilton, I can pay you the penny now, for I did not have one on Saturday.” The record does not show whether Hamilton took it or not, although he was at that moment given the opportunity to speak—and said nothing.