Shooting Victoria (56 page)

Braving Cleasby's objections, Hume-Williams laid out the evidence for insanity—the life of unceasing illness, the head injury, the family predisposition to insanity, the growing “paroxysm of insanity,” which peaked during the week of the thanksgiving. He crafted his case in the now well-tried pattern of Hadfield's and Oxford's defenses, bringing forward witnesses to O'Connor's eccentricities, and then calling a number of medical witnesses, in the hopes of demonstrating to the jury that the overwhelming medical consensus was that O'Connor was insane. But despite Hume-Williams's promise of a “startling” amount of evidence, his witness list was small: he brought forth only O'Connor's
parents and four doctors. And only half of these witnesses actually helped his case. George O'Connor, Thomas Harrington Tuke, and another doctor, James Thompson Sabben, did testify to the boy's insanity. But the third doctor—Henry Smith, who had amputated O'Connor's toe years before—claimed that the boy's intelligence was above average. And J. Rowland Gibson, surgeon of Newgate, stated that after observing the boy daily since the first of March, he was certain that O'Connor was of sound mind.

Catherine O'Connor proved to harm more than help the defense, testifying that her son was not only sane, but perfectly correct, in pleading guilty: “I had always told him to tell the truth, and I believe he has done so.” If Hume-Williams had any reason to call O'Connor's mother to the stand, it was because she was the one most familiar with her son's writings—writings she never could make sense of, but which her son assured her would make him famous someday. O'Connor burned his papers before his attempt at St. Paul's, but had missed some, and Hume-Williams, employing the time-honored tactic of connecting bad poetry with a diseased brain, took advantage of Catherine's testimony to read some of her son's “incoherent” work, until Baron Cleasby interrupted, dismissing the evidence as irrelevant.

Attorney General Coleridge, having recently made his name with his bitter cross-examination of the Tichborne Claimant, seemed to carry his rage into this case, genuinely affronted that George O'Connor, Dr. Tuke, and Hume-Williams sought to impose a worse punishment upon the boy in defending him. He cross-examined George O'Connor with caustic fervor. He revealed O'Connor Senior's deep concern about his son's “paroxysm of madness” as a lie—what else would explain the fact that the man allowed Arthur to take his nine-year-old brother out to view the illuminations the next day? More than this, Coleridge showed O'Connor to be a fool unable to understand his son's best interests:

Is it your desire that your son should be imprisoned for life in a lunatic asylum?—Certainly not.

But you wish that he should be found not guilty on the ground of insanity?—Excuse me, but it is rather a difficult question.

I want to know whether you are aware of what you are about. Is that your wish that he should be kept for life in a lunatic asylum?—Certainly not.

Do you know that follows?—Yes.

Is that what you wish?—It is not what I wish.

Fully understanding that, you elect that the question of his sanity should be tried?—Yes; as regards his sanity when he did the act.

Coleridge's most bitter attack, however, he reserved for Dr. Tuke, whom he presented as the prime mover of this idiotic defense, whose intrusion, if successful, would only make things worse for the boy. Arthur O'Connor was deeply amused by Coleridge's brutal cross-examination, bursting into laughter as he ran rings around Tuke in attacking the logic of Tuke's diagnosis of “reasoning insanity.” Coleridge reduced Tuke to silence when he asked him how O'Connor's getting shut up in Broadmoor for life because of Tuke's testimony was more sensible than the boy's throwing himself upon the mercy of the court. And he forced Tuke to admit that O'Connor's pleading guilty was actually a sign that O'Connor's sanity had returned. Tuke stepped from the witness box smarting, and later considered himself to be victim of poor timing, suffering more greatly in Coleridge's cross-examination because “I was his first subject since he had showered vituperation upon the Tichborne Claimant.”

After Dr. Gibson testified to O'Connor's complete sanity, the jury had had enough. They stopped the trial and announced through their foreman “that the prisoner was a perfectly sane man when he pleaded to the indictment, and that he was perfectly sane now.” Baron Cleasby agreed immediately. Coleridge, in asking for a sentence, could not help but snipe one more time at “the
unfortunate course which Dr. Tuke had thought fit to take in the case,” but did note that some good had come from the trial: Tuke had forced him to present O'Connor's character in a better light than he otherwise would have. He requested that the judge take this into account in his sentencing.

And Baron Cleasby apparently did just that. In sentencing O'Connor, he weighed the aggravating factors—O'Connor's evil intention, the cunning and manner of the crime, and the occasion on which it was committed—against the mitigating ones: his age, his unfortunate “enthusiasm,” which got the better of his mind, and the absurdity of the attempt itself, which suggested that he was not fully in his right mind at the time. His sentence: one year's imprisonment at hard labor. And during that time, one whipping: twenty strokes with a birch rod.

The courtroom was rent with a shriek at the mention of whipping: Arthur's mother Catherine cried out, apparently devastated by two equally unbearable thoughts: that of the rod on her son's tender back, and of the lost honor of the great O'Connors.

Queen Victoria was told of the sentence that evening at Windsor, and immediately lashed out at her prime minister, dividing her anger between O'Connor, the judge who sentenced him so leniently, and the government that could allow this to happen:

The Queen's object in writing to Mr. Gladstone today is to express her surprise & annoyance at the
extreme leniency
of O'Connor's Sentence (wh she has just learnt) especially as regards the length of imprisonment, & to remind Mr. Gladstone of his having said to her that if there was not
sufficient protection
from the
Law
, as it
stood at present
it
must
be
amended…
.

Her safety & her peace of mind will be in
constant
danger & constantly
disturbed
—thereby making it
almost impossible
for her to go about in public,—or
at all in London
, if she has
no security
that such miscreants will NOT be allowed to go
about
in this country—ready at any moment to alarm & insult her again. And the Queen
does demand
from the Govt that protection wh as a Queen & as a Woman she feels she has a
right to expect
.—It ought to be in the Power of the law to have such a man sent out of the country & not to allow him to return except
under surveillance
.

The effect of this short imprisonment will be
vy bad
—both
abroad
&
at home
.

Gladstone did his best to placate her, agreeing with her in deploring the leniency of Cleasby's sentence, which had astonished his entire Cabinet as well as himself. (Dr. Tuke, he noted, had caused “much mischief” through his “gratuitous intervention,” but that offered no excuse for Cleasby's dereliction of duty.) As far as changing the law went—it was the judge and not the law at fault, for the law did allow for the harsher penalties of seven years' penal servitude, or three years' imprisonment with three whippings. Still, he offered to do all he could to create a future for the boy more in accordance with the Queen's wishes. The government, of course, could ensure that after he was released, “the eye of the police should continue to rest upon O'Connor.” But he believed the government could do more, and in the convoluted and overcautious style he generally adopted in communicating with the Queen, told her

… it may be found practicable, even under present circumstances, to do what will be far preferable, namely by commutation, and voluntary inducement to get him out of the country for good. This arrangement would probably be the most satisfactory to Your Majesty under the circumstances and Mr. Gladstone feels himself safe in saying that the government will be most desirous to
give effect to any wishes which Your Majesty is likely to entertain upon the subject.

In other words, the government hoped, by offering to remove the penalty of whipping from O'Connor's sentence, to induce him to stay out of Britain for the rest of Victoria's life.

The Queen declared herself through her Private Secretary to be placated—almost. She still wished that Judge Cleasby suffer some sort of censure at the hands of the Lord Chancellor. (Gladstone suggested in return that the “animadversions of the press” would more effectively “repress these strange aberrations.”) And she begged to differ with Gladstone about the law as it presently stood: it
did
need changing, for it lacked a provision expatriating offenders. Surely, in the course of time, Gladstone could consider amending the law to do that?

Gladstone suggested that his government might indeed consider that change “should an opportunity occur when it might be obtained with facility.” (The opportunity, however, never arrived; Peel's law was never amended to incorporate exile as a penalty.) In the meantime, Gladstone happily reported that he foresaw no problem with getting O'Connor out of the country: Colonel Henderson, the commissioner of police, had told him that “there will probably be little difficulty in arranging for O'Connor's permanent removal from the country.” In time, Gladstone would discover that removing O'Connor would not be that easy. And in her premonition that O'Connor's short sentence and proximity to her would continue to cause her trouble, Victoria was absolutely accurate.

Home Secretary Henry Bruce quickly acted to keep the possibility of O'Connor's exile alive. The day after the boy's sentencing he wrote the governor of Newgate to suspend the sentence of whipping there and at any prisons to which he was transferred—Clerkenwell and Coldbath Fields, as it turned out. And there the government left matters until November 1872, when Bruce, who, acting through Governor Colville of Coldbath Fields, gave
O'Connor an inkling of the government's plan to substitute exile for whipping, and encouraged O'Connor to petition for a remission of his punishment. O'Connor—without consulting his parents, the governor made clear—duly submitted a clearly written, contrite plea, denying that he had ever intended to harm the Queen, and claiming not only that had never met a Fenian in his life, but that he deeply deplored their actions. He claimed that when he assaulted the Queen, he was in a state between sanity and madness—”I was not mad, nor was I perfectly sensible”—and that he was “laboring under two of the most wasting and irritating diseases to which the human frame is liable”—which in turn drove him “to phrenzy” and “a condition bordering upon imbecility.” If he could be freed from the shame and reproach of a whipping, he was fully prepared to leave England for a “distant & warmer climate,” free from any police supervision, until “all suspicion and distrust of me will cease to exist.”

The petition was rushed to the Home Office, and Bruce quickly conveyed to O'Connor the specific terms of the government's offer: O'Connor would be freed from prison without the whipping if he would agree to exile in the southern African colony of Natal and not return during the life of the Queen. The terms likely came too quickly to the boy, for he began to understand how desperately the government wanted him gone, and that this gave him leverage. And so he balked. He wished to speak with his parents about the deal; and he certainly could not agree to exile from England for the rest of the Queen's life. The Queen, as far as he knew, was perfectly healthy, and might live for twenty or thirty years. “I can never agree to a condition which would condemn me to almost perpetual exile; & which would be rendered a living death by the knowledge that the dearest of my relations might pass from this life while I thousands of miles away could only cry out against that which withheld me from them at such a moment.…”

Governor Colville, in passing O'Connor's letter on to Bruce, suggested that the boy might be content with five years' exile. Though the Home Secretary personally had no problem with this,
considering that if O'Connor ever returned “it w
^d
be as an altered man,” he doubted the Queen would be pleased. In his next letter, written on New Year's Eve 1872, O'Connor proved to be even more recalcitrant. He had completely cottoned on to the government's motives, writing incredulously “I conclude that the Home Office believes me to be possessed of a Royal mania or something of the sort & that for H. Majesty's safety and peace of mind they desire me to leave the country.” He was willing to leave the country—but would not do so under any conditions whatsoever, going rather as “an independent and unrestrained individual.”

“This is vexatious,” Bruce wrote his undersecretary the next day. Understanding now that the boy had the upper hand, Bruce directed that Governor Colville impress upon O'Connor the pain and indignity of flogging, and let him know that if he were willing to go abroad, Bruce would agree to set no conditions as to his returning home, “which,” he acknowledged, “in fact we have no power to make.” At this point, George O'Connor entered into the negotiations, asking that his son be shipped to Tasmania (where the children of George's uncle Roderic—Feargus's half-brother—were prosperous landowners) rather than Natal, and requesting that the boy be allowed a couple of days at home before he set out. Arthur then repeated his father's demands with a haughtiness that exasperated Governor Colville: “he seems to take a higher tone, and to consider himself a person of some importance.” Colville suggested to Bruce that they go ahead and let him be whipped.