Shooting Victoria (52 page)

The boy had every reason to be infuriated by this cult: what, after all, had that German prince done to deserve this worship? Little more, it seems, than to sire nine royal burdens upon the state, and to put on a fair on this spot in 1851. Monuments to the great men of the boy's own family were surely better-deserved: where were they? The boy was convinced, as were his father and grandfather before him, that the blood of the great Kings of Connaught flowed through his veins: hadn't his great-grandfather changed his name from Conner to O'Connor to proclaim that lineage to the world? Where were the monuments to them? And where was the monument to his great-great-uncle and his namesake, Arthur, a diehard Irish republican and a leader of the United Irishmen? Arthur O'Connor went to France in 1796 to negotiate the landing in Ireland of a French army of liberation. After that invasion failed, Arthur and his brother, young Arthur's great-grandfather Roger—another United Irishman—were arrested, imprisoned, and then exiled by the British to France, where Arthur O'Connor had been appointed a general of the French army by the great Napoleon himself: surely he deserved his monument? Where, for that matter, was the monument to the young Arthur's great-uncle, Francis Burdett O'Connor, who in 1819 set out with two hundred Irish volunteers to liberate South America from the imperial Spanish yoke? Did he not become General Francisco Burdett O'Connor, the great Simon Bolívar's chief of staff, and engage in battles for freedom from Peru to Panama?

And where was the recognition due the greatest O'Connor of all—his great-uncle Feargus O'Connor, the great champion of the working-man—the man still remembered as the “Lion of Freedom”? By virtue of his fiery oratory, his unstoppable energy, his undying love for the “fustian jackets, the blistered hands, the unshorn chins,” Feargus O'Connor became for fifteen years the sole and undisputed popular leader of Chartism, repeatedly braving the rich and powerful in Parliament: three times he brought before them the people's demand for a Charter establishing their political rights. At Feargus O'Connor's funeral in 1855, people showed up at Kensal Green in numbers too great for that cemetery to contain. They carried banners declaring him to be their savior: “He lived and died for us.” Never had the English proletariat had a stronger champion. His enemies—and he had many—might say that Feargus O'Connor died a raving lunatic. Young Arthur O'Connor refused to believe it—committing him to Dr. Tuke's asylum was simply a trick to deny him the reputation he deserved. Where then was the “Feargus Memorial”? Where was the “Royal Feargus Hall”?
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How unfair it must have seemed to young Arthur O'Connor that Albert was covered in glory while his own family had sunk into obscurity and squalor. Just fifty years before, his family had owned substantial lands in Ireland, but that fortune had now dissipated completely. Arthur lived with his family—nine in all—on the verge of starvation in a single room of a dilapidated Aldgate tenement, at the edge of Seven-Step Alley, one of the worst Irish rookeries in London. His father made just enough money taking tickets for the London and Waterman's Steamboat Company to provide his family with the thinnest veneer of respectability. Arthur was their third child, but perhaps the one upon whom the parents pinned their greatest hopes. While their eldest son had enlisted
in the army and their eldest daughter had trained as a teacher, Arthur, as a clerk, was on the bottom rung of the ladder to middle-class respectability. He had worked for a firm of printers for four years, then for a lawyer. Now, at seventeen, he worked as a junior accountant across the river in Southwark for Livett Franks and Son, a paint manufacturer. He acquitted himself well in all of these positions. But he had since birth been cursed with ill health—a pigeon-breasted, scrofulous rail of a boy; later, a reporter would see in his pitiful body nothing less than evidence of the degeneration of Western civilization: O'Connor was “of the order from whose plentifulness some physiologists forbode a deterioration of the human race in our great towns.” Ill health stifled his advancement: raging scrofula had ended his job with the printers', sending him to King's College Hospital, where he had a toe amputated.

His body was a miserable container for what he knew to be a great soul. He could feel within himself the blood and the spirit of the great O'Connors. He was a scholar, a dreamer, a writer—spending night after night in a corner of his crowded room, studying, and composing great works of poetic genius, which he had assured his parents were destined for publication and fame. He was Johnnie Keats and Lord Byron combined: a hypersensitive romantic soul, aching to live and die for a great cause.

And indeed, he had a cause. Though he had lived his entire life in London, he was “passionately Irish,” as he later wrote, and devoted to the struggle for Irish freedom. He had likely never even met a Fenian, but his blood and the acts of his forefathers connected him deeply with them. The flower of the movement, he knew, continued to rot in English and Irish jails, and he knew as well that the greatest act of an Irish patriot would be to free those prisoners. And, as he walked the periphery of the Serpentine, Arthur O'Connor understood his destiny in a flash. He would be that man. He would in one act free the Fenian prisoners, restore the reputation of the O'Connors, and join the pantheon of great Irish heroes.

He would kill Queen Victoria.

There would never be a better opportunity to kill the Queen than during the thanksgiving to be held in two weeks, when she would emerge from her long seclusion and show herself at St. Paul's, where England's rich and powerful would all be witnesses to the shooting.

He mulled over the plan for rest of the day. Something about it was not quite right, and he finally acknowledged the flaw. If he killed the Queen, the now-recovering Prince of Wales would replace her: the new king certainly would not free the Fenians. He would have to modify his plan. He would not kill the Queen, but would terrify her: putting a pistol to her head, he would frighten her into signing a declaration freeing the Irish prisoners. If he could succeed in getting close enough to her, he was sure that all around her would be “paralyzed with horror”—powerless to intervene. He knew he would never escape from his assault. He expected he would be bayoneted on the spot; if not, he would certainly be executed for High Treason. So be it: he cared little for his life and knew that with his death would come everlasting fame. But if he was to sacrifice his life for Ireland, he wished to die a hero—not hanged like a common criminal, but shot by a firing squad. He would include a codicil to that effect in his declaration.

During the next fortnight, then, while Victoria bickered with her prime minister about the coming thanksgiving and the minutiae of her role, Arthur O'Connor prepared to play his own. He somehow managed to obtain a clean parchment; carefully lining it with a pencil, he set out the Queen's declaration in his best clerk's hand and best legalese: “I, Victoria, Queen by the grace of God, do make the following declaration.…” With an astonishing over-estimation of the power of the monarch, he had Victoria declare that she would “grant a free pardon to each and every one of the said men known and celebrated as the Fenian prisoners,” “with the consent of my Parliament”—as if her saying it was so would make it so. He then set out carefully, in four clauses, the conditions of absolute freedom she granted the prisoners. In a fifth clause, he
tackled the tricky problem of coercion, attempting to head off any attempt to nullify an Act the Queen had been forced to sign:

… notwithstanding the fact of my agreeing to the above conditions only through fear of my life, I will not attempt to depart from any of them on that account, nor upon any other reason, cause, or pretext whatever will I depart, or attempt to depart, from any of them; neither will I listen to any advice which my Ministers may wish to give toward causing me to depart from my word, or toward the violation of anything above stated, but shall adhere strictly to everything. So help me God.

He left there a space for the Queen's signature and, underneath, inserted the codicil which would, he hoped, guarantee him a hero's execution:

Now I, the said Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, do solemnly pledge my Royal word to the effect that if the said Arthur O'Connor be found guilty of death by my judges, after a just and fair trial, he the said Arthur O'Connor shall not be strangled like a common felon, but shall receive that death which is due to him as a Christian, a Republican, and as one who has never harmed a human being—that is to say, he shall be shot, and after death his body shall be delivered to his friends to be buried wheresoever they may choose.

In order to allay the suspicions of his family or his employers, Arthur O'Connor kept to his daily routine until Monday 26 February, the day before the thanksgiving. On that afternoon, after leaving work in Southwark, he obtained his pistol—the cheapest he could find. He had spotted it in the window of a jeweler's near his workplace—a flintlock, a small, decrepit relic of another age. It was
missing its flint, and flints were not easy to come by in 1872; the clerk told him he would have to pick up a piece of flint from the road and cut it to proper shape. (And he did.) O'Connor had never handled a gun in his life, and had to ask how it worked. The clerk told him about powder, bullet, and wad. But there is no evidence that Arthur O'Connor bought any of these things; he paid four shillings for the pistol alone, and left. The pistol was intact when he bought it, but did not remain so for long; the same evening, while practicing his shooting style, he broke off the pan and ruined the lock. At some point a greasy red rag found its way into the barrel; inexplicably, for the next few days it would remain there, broadcasting the worthlessness of the weapon.

That night, O'Connor filled his pockets. He helpfully brought pen and ink, thinking to avoid the awkward wait for one of the ten thousand to produce them while he held his pistol to Victoria's temple. He pocketed the pistol, the petition, and, just in case, a long, thin, open knife of his father's. He slipped out of his house for the short walk due west to St. Paul's. It was 11:00
P.M.,
and the cathedral was abuzz with activity: workmen were preparing seating; seamstresses were decorating the temporary chambers set aside for the refreshment of the Queen and the Princess of Wales—and police were guarding the entrances. When he attempted to slip in, an officer promptly challenged him and turned him away. Nevertheless, somehow he got in—“by a stratagem,” he later claimed. He took cover underneath some benches, hoping to hide until the morning.

He was soon found. He had tracked mud on the otherwise clean carpets to his hiding place; a verger discovered him and turned him out. He then tried to hide in a cold, dark space on the cathedral's porch. A police sergeant caught him there with the glaring spotlight of his bull's-eye lantern and ordered him off the property. O'Connor then wandered the streets of the City until 5:30 the next morning, ruminating upon how he could get close to the Queen. He decided to give up entering the cathedral altogether. Instead,
he would confront the Queen somewhere on her procession to or from the service. He returned home, put the pistol, the knife, and the declaration under his pillow, and slept until 8:00, when he rose, rearmed himself, and set out again for St. Paul's and the route of the procession. He quickly realized that he had made a serious mistake. The crowds were already massing along the route in numbers too thick to penetrate. He spent hours wandering the route, looking for a place where he could push his way to the front—but could find none. The Queen had her thanksgiving without him, her subjects—as the newspapers had been saying ever since Oxford's attempt upon her—providing her best protection.

Arthur O'Connor returned home that evening. His mother asked him where he had been. To St. Paul's, he said—but he “had not gained his object.” He would not tell her what that object was. He slept until the next morning, and, again arming himself with declaration, pistol, and knife, walked across town to the front of Buckingham Palace, joining the crowd assembled there hoping the Queen would emerge. She did emerge that day—twice, for a ride in the parks and for a visit to a sculptor's studio—but somehow O'Connor missed her. He returned home. His chances, he knew, were running out: the Queen left for Windsor in two days, on the first of March.

That night, O'Connor took a break from stalking Victoria and instead celebrated her; he took his nine-year-old brother out to gaze at the brilliant thanksgiving illuminations that stretched from St. Paul's to the Palace.

The next day, Thursday 29 February—Leap Day—he awoke weary and jaded, according to his father. He complained of having no rest, and pains in his head. Equipping himself with declaration, pistol, and knife, but leaving pen and ink behind, he returned to the Palace in the afternoon, arriving after four to hear the cheering and see the Queen's carriage heading up Constitution Hill. Victoria had that afternoon held Court at the Palace, and, as she had done so many times in the past, she afterwards set out for a ride through
the parks. She sat on the right side of the carriage, facing the horses. Next to her sat one of her favorite ladies-in-waiting, Lady Jane Churchill, and across from them were Victoria's two youngest sons: on the Queen's side sat twenty-year-old Arthur and next to him Leopold, who at eighteen was barely older than O'Connor. For Prince Arthur, this was a farewell ride with his mother; he would be returning to army service in Dover that evening. Leopold, on the other hand, had nothing to do with the military. He could not: he was a hemophiliac and had suffered from early childhood his mother's stifling overprotection.

Accompanying her on either side were her equerries—she had two now, since Albert's death—Lord Fitzroy and General Hardinge riding on either side of the carriage. Two outriders rode before, two grooms behind. And John Brown sat at the Queen's back.