Shooting Victoria (47 page)

Both the judges and the prosecution responded to this litany of oddity by adhering strictly to the McNaughtan Rules. Any evidence that did not directly address the question of whether Pate could tell right from wrong at the moment of the attack was not relevant to them. When Charles Mahon, better known as the “O'Gorman Mahon,” testified that in his opinion Pate was a “maniac … the frequent subject of remark amongst myself and [my] companions,” one of the judges asked him “you think he would not do a wrong act, because he would know it to be wrong?” “Certainly,” Mahon answered, with that word rendering the rest of his evidence useless.

With the two medical witnesses, the Attorney General took pains to demonstrate that their conception of insanity was not at all the legal conception of insanity—that though much of what was wrong with Pate could be construed as mental illness, as long as Pate was aware of the immorality of his action he was criminally responsible for it. When, for example, Dr. Conolly offered a full diagnosis of his mental debility—“he presents an example of what is not at all uncommon to me, of persons who are very devoid of mental power … who consequently persevere in no pursuit, have no object, and are unfit for all the ordinary duties of life”—Jervis shifted the focus to Pate's legal responsibility, Conolly admitting in response to his question “If you were to speak of an action that was decidedly right or wrong he would very clearly understand it, as clearly as I should myself.” After Monro's assertion that Pate suffered delusions in the past, Jervis asked him “Is he, in your judgment, capable of distinguishing between right and wrong?” “In many things, certainly,” Monro replied. Both Conolly and Monro attempted to explain that Pate could distinguish between right and wrong but was still not responsible for his action since he was at that moment a slave to an impulse he could not control. He was “subject to sudden impulses of passion,” Conolly claimed; Monro maintained that “it frequently happens with persons of diseased mind that they will perversely do what they know to be
wrong.” The notion that an irresistible impulse negated criminal responsibility was not new; indeed, it was a pillar of Cockburn's defense of McNaughtan. But it was the pillar that the Law Lords ignored when formulating their rules, and it was clear that it meant little to the judges now.

Both Conolly and Monro had made clear that Pate knew exactly what he was doing; given this fact, their personal opinions of his unsoundness was irrelevant and, worse, inappropriate in a court of law. When Monro stated his judgment of Pate's mental illness, Baron Alderson gave him a tongue-lashing that showed that, in Alderson's mind at least, the status of the expert medical testimony had not changed since Oxford's trial ten years before. “Be so good, Dr. Monro,” Alderson snapped at him,

… as not to take upon yourself the functions of the judges and the jury. If you can give us the results of your scientific knowledge upon the point we shall be glad to hear you; but while I am sitting upon the bench I will not permit any medical witness to usurp the functions of both the judge and the jury.

In his closing statement, the Attorney General demonstrated that he was well aware of the defense's attempt to soften Pate's sentence, and he attempted to head it off. Telling the jury—and more importantly, the judges—that the defense was seeking a more lenient sentence because of Pate's mental weakness, he exhorted them not to mitigate Pate's sentence in the least—Pate was a dangerous man, and if he were soon free, probably “unwatched and unrestrained,” he would “renew his dangerous and violent proceedings.” Either convict him with a full punishment, or acquit him by reason of insanity and thus restrain him from further mischief.

Baron Alderson agreed with Jervis, and made that extremely clear in his summation to the jury. That Pate had struck the Queen, he told them, was indisputable, and they were thus left with a single
question: Was Pate of sound mind when he hit her? He argued that Pate might well be insane but still punishable if his insanity had no bearing on the crime itself. As examples, he noted that a man who killed a man under the delusion that that man was trying to kill him was not criminally responsible, while a man who killed another man while suffering the delusion that his own head was made of glass was still responsible for his crime. He then rephrased the single question for the jury: “Did this unfortunate gentleman know it was wrong to strike the Queen on the forehead?” The notion of an irresistible impulse he dismissed out of hand as “one which would never be listened to by any sane jury.” “A man might say that he picked a pocket from some uncontrollable impulse,” Alderson wryly observed, “and in that case the law would have an uncontrollable impulse to punish him for it.”

It was now 3:20 in the afternoon. The jury consulted for a few minutes, and then retired to discuss the case further. Their decision should have been an easy one, as not a shred of evidence suggested that Pate had been unaware that what he did was wrong. But the defense's abundance of evidence as to Pate's strange behaviors and mental deficiencies apparently complicated their deliberations: McNaughtan Rules or not, some of the jurors must have wondered if the man deserved an acquittal on the grounds of insanity. The jury deliberated for nearly four hours—a long time in a Victorian court of law—before agreeing on their verdict: guilty.

In passing judgment, Baron Alderson noted Pate's eccentric habits, his “differing from other men,” his mental affliction. Indeed, he opined that “you are as insane as it is possible for a person to be who is capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.” For all that, he told Pate, “you are to be pitied.” But none of this mitigated the seriousness of the crime: a soldier striking a woman, and worse, the Queen—”a lady entitled to the respect of the whole country by her virtues and her exalted position.” Cockburn and Huddleston had erred in considering that the judges might lessen the sentence out of pity for their client. Alderson, rather, threw
the book at him, imposing the maximum sentence of seven years' transportation—the longest time he could prevent Pate from doing mischief. Pate would not be subject to the “disgraceful punishment of whipping,” Alderson told him, because of “the station of your family and your own position.” Alderson's turn of phrase here was unfortunate, leading several who read the trial in the newspapers the next day, including an angry member of Parliament, to conclude that the court had given Pate special treatment because of his social status. This was simply not the case, as the law was clear: whipping could not be added to a sentence of transportation; it could only be a humiliating addition to a shorter term of imprisonment. If whipping had been involved, Alexander Cockburn could have considered himself a winner in this his final case as Queen's Counsel. Instead, he had lost, and had lost badly.

Pate heard the sentence without any emotion, turned, and without the usual embellishment or excitement in his gait, he walked down the tunnel and back to Newgate.

Pate was, on the next day, transferred—as were all prisoners sentenced to transportation—across town to Pimlico, by the Thames, to towering and stinking Millbank Prison—“one of the most successful realizations, on a large scale, of the ugly in architecture,” Henry Mayhew said of it. Once Pate was there, all similarities to the circumstances of other transportees ended. For them, Mill-bank was the starting point of several years of incarceration—a launching point for Pentonville, Portland, or Portsmouth prisons, or to hard labor in the naval dockyards and to confinement in the dreaded prison ships, the Hulks. William Hamilton had passed through Millbank a year before and was still working his way through the system: his ship to Australia would not sail for another four years. Pate, unlike Hamilton, was the son of a rich man, and though father and son had been estranged, after the attack Robert Pate Senior seemed determined to obtain for his son the best that money could buy. Having failed at obtaining a good verdict, he had
better luck at buying a gentler imprisonment and an earlier voyage to Van Diemen's Land.

While Pate, given his history of self-seclusion, might not have minded the usual solitary confinement experienced by prisoners in this, their first stage of what the government euphemistically termed “assisted exile,” his weeks at Millbank were rather passed in catered comfort, if an irate letter to the
Daily News
is accurate. According to this letter, Pate was given an officer's room and an officer to attend upon him, had access to the governor, and had a separate exercise yard. He fed on mutton chops, and, extraordinarily, was allowed to wear his own linen and was measured for a custom-made uniform by the prison's master tailor. It all sounds like more than even Pate Senior could buy, and perhaps some of it was: according to another account, Pate spent his time at Millbank in the infirmary, placed there after the Home Secretary ordered him examined, consequent to the medical testimony during his trial. “Pate, we are informed, is in a very delicate state of health, and he employs his time by writing letters in different languages.” In either case, his introduction to a convict's life was cushioned.

He was quietly removed from the prison on Monday the fifth of August to Portsmouth, where his ship, the convict ship
William Jardine
, awaited him. He sailed on the twelfth. He left behind him a life of delusion, obsession, compulsion, paranoia, disgrace, and heartbreaking loneliness in London. He could only hope for something better in Van Diemen's Land.

And, amazingly enough, he found it.

*
The narrow entry and exit gates still exist outside Cambridge House, now 94 Piccadilly. From 1866 until 1999, Cambridge House housed the Naval and Military Club, familiarly known as the “In and Out Club” because of the markings on these two gates.

*
Seventeen years later, Victoria told Home Secretary Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, after complaining about Pate's attack, “firearms she had not minded, as if they missed there was nothing to trouble you, and a moving carriage prevented a good aim” (Gathorne-Hardy 1:244).

*
Within two months, Palmerston had his revenge on Russell, moving to attach an amendment which the government opposed to a bill; the amendment passed and Russell resigned the next day. “I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell,” Palmerston wrote (St. Aubyn 255).

*
An amendment, moving the abandonment of the Hyde Park site altogether, fell nearly as badly: 47 for and 166 against.

*
Yet another distraction of attention from Pate had occurred three days before: the Duke of Cambridge had finally died on 8 July, throwing Court and polite society into full mourning.

**
Welsby, Bodkin, and Clark.

eighteen

G
REAT
E
XHIBITION

I
t was the happiest day of her life. “I wish you
could
have witnessed the 1
st May
1851,” she gushed to Uncle Leopold—“the
greatest
day in our history, the
most beautiful
and
imposing
and
touching
spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my beloved Albert.” The day began with a birthday celebration: it was her son Arthur's first. That meant it was the Duke of Wellington's birthday as well—his eighty-second—and in the afternoon the old man came to the infant to exchange presents. But the day was truly Albert's, the day on which by his talent and ingenuity he transcended his foreign origin to achieve a sort of national apotheosis. Today was the opening day of his great project, the Great Exhibition. Finally, the world understood his inestimable value as Victoria always had. “Albert's dearest name is immortalised with this
great
conception,
his
own,” Victoria wrote; “
his
own, and my
own
dear country
showed
she was
worthy
of it.”

From early in the morning, the crowds began to assemble in numbers simply too great to count, forming a sea of humanity stretching from the east façade of Buckingham Palace, up Constitution Hill, and covering Hyde Park—boats covering the surface of the Serpentine, boys flocking precariously upon the groaning branches of the Park's trees, multitudes crammed into the windows and onto the roofs of Knightsbridge houses. At the center of it all was Paxton's amazing Crystal Palace, 1,851 feet long and 408 feet wide—more than three times the area of the new Houses of Parliament—900,000 shimmering square feet of glass, packed full with treasures from around the world. At nine, the doors opened and twenty-five thousand season ticket holders made a mad scramble for the north transept of the building to vie for space near the great crystal fountain, where a throne and dais had been set up for the opening ceremony. The crowd swept away the barriers there, but a party of Royal Sappers soon restored order, and the thousands more calmly found places throughout the building, the women taking the seats provided for them, the men standing behind; all craning their necks to watch for august arrivals. The Queen and Prince would be arriving, and the ceremony would begin, at noon.