Shooting Victoria (57 page)

That Bruce would not do. By mid-January, he acceded to all of the O'Connors' demands. A suitable passage was obtained on the
Lodore
. O'Connor stayed at his parents' house for a fortnight (for which George O'Connor billed the government £10); and on 12 February 1873 he set sail—for Sydney rather than Tasmania, O'Connor's parents probably deciding their Hobart relatives would want nothing to do with the boy. Bruce contacted the Foreign Office, which in turn contacted the Governor of New South Wales, Hercules Robinson, warning of O'Connor's arrival and asking that
the police there keep him under surveillance and find him some sort of employment.

O'Connor arrived at Sydney on 20 May 1873 and reported immediately to Governor Robinson's private secretary. He had adopted the alias “George Morton,” which he held religiously while in Australia (“the people being very loyal,” he later wrote, “I might suffer some annoyance were I to be known”). While O'Connor impressed favorably all who knew him in Sydney, he was himself less than impressed by the place: Sydney, he claimed, simply did not offer a field for a man of his literary talents. He made clear from the start that he wished to return to England as soon as he could. Life was to get even worse for him, though. Governor Robinson, fearing that if O'Connor's past became known, “the matter would be eagerly seized upon and made the ground for an attack on the Ministry,” found him a job in the distant town of Morpeth as a butcher's clerk.

While suffering in Morpeth, O'Connor took what he was sure would be a first step toward gaining the literary fame for which he knew he was destined: he wrote a letter to the Queen. He did so, he told Governor Robinson, because the Queen had asked him to. And so he wrote, passing on the letter to Robinson, who duly sent it on to the Colonial Office, which passed it on to Bruce in the Home Office. The letter detailed O'Connor's depressing passage out, as well as his observations of Sydney and his “distasteful” Morpeth job. It also—at some length and in prose of the deepest purple—waxed glorious about his literary abilities and ambitions. He had a poet's mind, and that mind “stands alone, and lives in a glorious solitude, apart from the world; and to its music, the sounds of trade, are death. It is a heavenly blossom, that would spring up into glory, in a desert, but which would die despairingly, amidst the horrors of the Counting house.” “I have not the slightest intention of settling out here,” he wrote Victoria. “I shall remain only till my health is restored, then return home and strive for literary eminence.” And he expected that Victoria would help him achieve
those heights. She would be so deeply impressed by this letter, he was sure, that she would see to its publication. And that would be just the start:

There is a prize toward which I am ever looking. None but a Poet can obtain it, and as yet I think, no Irish poet has held it—Passionately Irish myself, this honor I will bring upon Ireland, poor Ireland, if the highest limit of human striving can obtain success. It comes from the throne, and is now held by a writer yet “not one of the grand old masters”—He is not immortal.

Tennyson be damned: Victoria would one day understand O'Connor's genius and appoint him Poet Laureate.

The letter, of course, made it no further than the Home Office. “The man must be mad,” wrote Bruce; “His self-conceit is intolerable. Of course this letter must not go to H. M.” This clear proof of O'Connor's insanity sent Home Office officials scurrying to retrieve a record of his terms of exile, in the hopes of doing something to prevent his return. But Bruce remembered: there were no terms, and there was nothing they could do to stop him returning.

And he did return. He threw up his Morpeth job after a few weeks and returned to Sydney, where a more suitable job as a clerk in a firm of solicitors was found for him. The police, realizing his fifteen-shilling-a-week wage, without board, was not enough to live on, supplemented that pay with public funds. Neither that, nor the promise of a substantial raise, could dissuade him from booking passage back to England.

On 25 February 1874, Governor Robinson telegraphed Whitehall: “George Morton sailed for London (derry) today in
Hydaspes
—Ship may be looked for in ninety days.” “I had no legal power to detain the youth,” Robinson wrote to Richard Cross, Home Secretary of the newly elected Tory ministry. The authorities in England should feel no uneasiness about O'Connor's return,
Robinson added—because all in Sydney were deeply impressed by his intelligence and demeanor.

Cross was hardly reassured and quickly set a police watch on O'Connor when by summer he had returned to his parents' cramped Aldgate home. In July, Chief Inspector George Clarke interviewed O'Connor there. Clarke saw no signs of insanity, except for the fact that “he is of a romantic turn of mind, he has no employment, and spends most of his time at home reading and writing what he calls poetry.” Among his writings were more letters to the Queen—letters which almost certainly never reached her. He attributed the worst of motives to her silence, and his letters grew angry, and then threatening. It was likely the last of these letters which proved too dangerous to ignore, and Cross turned for help to the very person whom the Liberals and Attorney General Coleridge considered the most troublesome actor in the O'Connor case, three years before—Dr. Thomas Harrington Tuke. Cross forwarded O'Connor's letters to Tuke and requested that he obtain the assistance of other doctors to ascertain whether O'Connor was insane, and whether he posed a threat to the Queen. He knew, of course, that Tuke already considered O'Connor deeply insane, and knew as well that by the lunacy laws of the time, a certification of insanity by two doctors would safely place O'Connor in an asylum.

Tuke, delighted that the present government, unlike the last one, showed the highest respect for his expertise, was happy to help, and on 4 May he took O'Connor to the consulting room of Dr. William Gull. Tuke could not have chosen a better colleague to evaluate O'Connor. Gull had experience working with the insane, but more importantly he was a royal physician who had attended to the Prince of Wales in his illness, and who immediately after the scare of O'Connor's attempt had been called from Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace to treat Victoria.
*
Gull's agreement with Tuke would give a royal sanction of sorts to O'Connor's committal.

Realizing that the government's interest in him had escalated greatly, Arthur O'Connor himself brought matters to a head. He knew that on the next day, 5 May, Victoria would make one of her rare appearances in London, holding a drawing room at Buckingham Palace. That afternoon, therefore, O'Connor reappeared outside the northeast gate of the Palace at the same spot he had stood three years before. The police recognized him immediately. They watched him for a time as he oscillated between quiescence and excitement. “I was not excited,” O'Connor protested at his subsequent examination; “I was thinking what a wonderful calm reigned in London, and that it was owing to the perfection of government.” His intent, he claimed, was not homicide but suicide; he expected the police would kill him before he got near the Queen. He was arrested quietly, and quietly removed; no newspapers that evening or the next day carried any account of his return.

He was brought back to Scotland Yard, where he was examined by another doctor brought into the case by Tuke, Alexander Tweedie. Tweedie agreed with Tuke's and Gull's diagnosis of insanity. O'Connor himself now agreed with the doctors that he should be placed in an asylum, and had assisted Tuke by writing out for him a list of his symptoms:

Thought continually revolving upon religion. Visions at night of Angels hurling men [over] precipices to die for ever because they had not given up all they loved to go and sell Bibles to the unconverted. Sense that unless I gave up the drama, witty and happy society, and the world generally I should be everlastingly damned. In a word, one unceasing mania concerning Jesus Christ the intellect warring with the mania yet unable to crush it. Sense of utter want of constitution and energy, a feeling as if I were half dead.

The next day, O'Connor was again brought to Bow Street, where in the far less crowded courtroom he was not committed to
Newgate, but, with Tuke's and Tweedie's testimony and certification, committed to Hanwell Asylum as an “imbecile.” The Queen was again safe, and, as far as her Home Secretary was concerned, Thomas Harrington Tuke's involvement had prevented her from harm. Cross wrote Tuke a letter of thanks on behalf of himself and the public. Victoria, “surprised & annoyed” by O'Connor's return, must at least have been more pleased by the Conservatives' handling of him than she had been by the Liberals', three years before. “He is evidentially quite unfit to be at large,” Ponsonby wrote to her, “and there is no possibility of his being liberated from the Asylum at present.”

Thomas Harrington Tuke, who had never stopped smarting from John Coleridge's brutal cross-examination during O'Connor's trial, was exultant at what he saw to be his complete vindication, and within two weeks of O'Connor's committal he couldn't help but share his triumph and rail at Coleridge's “unfortunate” advocacy of O'Connor. “I freely forgive Lord Coleridge for his personal attack upon myself,” he wrote magnanimously in
The British Medical Journal
.

…
but he must surely now deeply deplore his share in a proceeding which consigned a sick and insane boy to degrading punishment, and to a prison instead of a hospital, thus, perhaps, rendering him a hopeless lunatic; he may also regret that he treated a medical witness with much discourtesy, and ridiculed scientific evidence that has ultimately proved correct; and he must feel deeply that his unfortunate advocacy very nearly resulted in injury or alarm to the Royal Mistress whom it was his special duty to protect and defend.

With his admission to Hanwell, Arthur O'Connor's involvement in Victoria's life came to an end. He was then twenty-one years old, and still had a long journey ahead of him; he would in a year and a half be freed from Hanwell as cured; another voyage
to Australia, and more asylums, were in his future. Victoria in 1875 had not quite lived up to the promise of her great coming-out during the thanksgiving week of 1872. She remained deeply suspicious about London and continued to keep her stays there to a minimum. And she had not involved the Prince of Wales any more deeply in political affairs. Gladstone's plans to make him Viceroy of Ireland, for one thing, had come to naught, for Victoria's jealousy of her own prerogatives was simply too strong, as were her doubts about her son's competence: “If only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me!” she wrote Vicky three months after O'Connor's attack. But though she remained largely invisible, and the Prince of Wales remained unable to gain great respect in politics, Victoria's popularity—and, for that matter, her son's—had grown, and would only continue to grow. British republicanism had passed in 1872 like a bad dream—the distant memory of a clever-looking boy with a rusty flintlock.

*
Gull considered that the Queen would suffer no lasting effects from the fright she suffered.

twenty–two

B
LUE

O
n the afternoon of 2 March 1882, a slouching and miserable-looking man shuffled down the platform of the Great Western Railway Station at Windsor. He paused furtively in a doorway and then slipped through, out of the cold and into the little paradise of the station's first-class waiting room. Roderick Maclean was filthy, either unwilling or unable to wash off the dust of the many roads upon which he had tramped. Grime and weariness conspired to make him appear older than his twenty-eight years. His chin was black with several days' worth of stubble. He wore shabby shoes, a shabby bowler, and an even shabbier overcoat. He had no train ticket. Anyone seeing him would instantly conclude that he did not belong in this room, with its leather armchairs and sofas, ornate gilded mirrors, writing desks, and luxurious carpet. But the room was empty, and Maclean had a pressing need to sit down and write a letter. He decided to chance it.

Besides, Maclean very well knew that he had every right to sit in this room or in any other. God had told him so, and more: much more. God read his thoughts and spoke to him personally, soothing and directing him as he made his troubled way through a dark and ignorant world. God had given him superhuman abilities—had made him a great poet, artist, and prophet. God had given him eternal life. And Almighty God had assured him that he was the chosen one, born to rule over the greatest empire on earth. He was certain that his own claim to the British throne was at least as great as George IV's had been—and was greater than Victoria's.

To him alone God had revealed the great secrets of the universe. The key to all power, he knew, lay in one number—and one color. The number was four. Earth, air, fire, water; north, south, east, west: four signified the earth and everything on it. More than this, four signified man's dominion over all the earth; chaotic nature drawn up, reconstituted, regularized, and employed to serve human ends. Right angles had little place in nature, but they were the hallmark of human creation and the sign of human power. In the thousand towns and cities through which Maclean had frantically wandered, he saw those four fourths expressed a billion times over: in every brick and cut stone, every intersection of streets, every wall, façade, door and window. And between all of these towns and cities roared the trains, the embodiment of Victorian progress and of the juggernaut of civilization, hurtling over countless rectangles of track and tie into infinity. Four was
his number;
God had given it and all it promised to him. Any occurrence of that number—as in 4, 14, 40, 104, 400, 404, 440, 444 and so on—was supposed to be auspicious for him. In a beaten-up notebook that he kept in his pocket, Maclean had set down in large letters a title for a work he knew would be one of genius: “The Fourth Path, a novel by Roderick Maclean.” And below that, he had written out
a recipe for an elixir: “four drops of sweet nitre and half a tumbler of water.”
*