Shooting Victoria (58 page)

The color—
his
color—was blue, the color of the sky, of the ocean—of immensity: of infinity. Blue signified his immortal and superhuman self, and his unique connection to God. And God had decreed blue his color by some sort of cosmic sumptuary law: Maclean knew that wearing blue was forbidden to anyone besides himself alone, and those who wished him well—who could wear his color to signal their affection for, their loyalty toward him.

But despite God's great favor, and all of God's promises, Roderick Maclean knew himself to be the most miserable man on earth, doomed to wander for years without succor or solace among millions of ignorant and petty people who feared him, hated him, and were engaged in a massive conspiracy to torment him and to destroy him if they could. They had appropriated the power of the number four—
his number
—to themselves: all of the matter of the earth were theirs to command, while he, homeless, without possessions or power over the things of this world, was slowly starving. Occurrences of four were now more likely ominous than auspicious to him. His enemies owned the bricks and stones, the façades and doors and windows, from behind which they sneered at him; they owned the streets upon which they brazenly insulted and attacked him. And his enemies had long been driving him to madness by stealing blue—
his color
—from him. He was no fool; he could see that more and more of his enemies wore blue dresses and bonnets and ribbons, blue waistcoats and overcoats, blue neckties, kerchiefs, scarves and shawls. They had done it at first to deceive him into thinking they were his friends when they were not. But now they meant him active harm: they wore blue to cause him
“perplexity and agony,” to “injure, annoy, and vex me on every opportunity.”

It hadn't always been this way. His childhood, he would later recall, was “as happy as any youthful days could be.” His father Charles Maclean had earned a fortune as master-carver and master-guilder to the gentry and nobility. He had employed—auspiciously—forty people. He specialized in picture frames and mirrors, which filled two luxurious showrooms in London, on Fleet Street and Oxford Street. The Queen herself had seen Charles Maclean's work; a massive console table and mirror that he manufactured had been given pride of place in the nave of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Roderick Maclean was born three years after the Exhibition and for his first dozen years lived in luxury in and above his father's wonderful looking-glass worlds, as well as in larger houses in Gloucester Road and then Earl's Court, and at an estate in the suburbs that he remembered as an Eden. He was educated to be a gentleman at a school on Harley Street, and became fluent in French and German. Roderick's father was a literary gentleman of sorts, taking up in 1861 the proprietorship of a new humor magazine,
Fun
, which became in time a highly successful rival to the great
Punch
. Roderick Maclean remembered his childhood homes as great literary salons, and indeed when he was a boy many up-and-coming writers gathered there. Roderick recalled mingling among George Augustus Sala, Tom Hood (son of the great comic poet), W. S. Gilbert in his pre-Sullivan days, and others. Not surprisingly, he began to contemplate a future as a great writer himself.

But the Macleans—and Roderick most forcibly—were cast out of this paradise in the mid-1860s. Though
Fun
later found its legs, it was in its infancy a drain on Charles Maclean's business, and he sold it in 1865. In the next year, Charles apparently lost much of his fortune in the spectacular collapse of the banking firm of Overend and Gurney, and he sold off his business by the end of the decade. During that same year, 1866, twelve-year-old Roderick suffered
his own fall, literally, slipping in the doorway of his Gloucester Road house, smashing his head and gashing his scalp open. He was under a doctor's care for over a month, and was never quite the same. His head continually gave off the sensation of a “slight shock from a galvanic battery,” and he suffered severe and recurrent headaches. More than this, Maclean claimed, the injury rendered him completely unable to perform manual labor. Apparently God began to speak to him around this time. In any case, his behavior changed alarmingly. He developed morbid fears that his siblings, his mother, and especially his father were trying to kill him, and began to sense that the world was leagued against him. He lashed back, threatening to kill his family and at one time vowing to blow up St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey.

Maclean attempted to solve the serious problem his son suddenly presented by sending him away. Twice he booked Roderick passage for America. Each time Roderick was certain that his father had bribed the sailors to throw him overboard; on the first ship he lay awake in his berth all night clutching a knife, ready to kill the first sailor who touched him. The next morning he demanded to disembark at Gravesend. He refused absolutely to board the second ship. In 1874, when Roderick was twenty, Charles Maclean took steps to have him committed to an asylum, and engaged the services of the two physicians required by Victorian lunacy law to issue a certificate of commitment. The first of these doctors, the renowned psychologist Henry Maudsley (yet another son-in-law, incidentally, of the now-deceased psychologist John Conolly) was happy to comply, and declared Roderick insane. The other doctor, Alfred Godrich, found Roderick highly excitable but not a lunatic, and thus refused to commit him. Thus thwarted, Maclean's father instead exiled Roderick as an apprentice on a farm near Dover. Horrified by the prospect of agricultural labor, Maclean fled, and as he did so he attempted to strike his first blow against the millions who oppressed him. Next to the farm lay tracks of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, and there Maclean offered a
young boy sixpence to derail a coming train with a beam of wood. The boy, unable to lift the beam, was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Maclean and the boy were caught and tried at Maidstone Assizes. Maclean's attorney argued ingeniously that inciting a person to do what he was unable to do was not an offense. Maclean and the boy were acquitted. This was not the only time that Roderick Maclean struck out at the railways; his father claimed that he attempted to derail trains at least twice more, and £100 was once offered for his apprehension.

For three years after that, he dwelled uneasily with his family. When his father died in 1877 and his mother died around the same time, his brother Charles tried to place him in the home of a family friend, the artist Samuel Stanesby, in what was a harrowing experience for everyone concerned. And after that, Roderick Maclean drifted. His four living siblings worked out a way both to support him and to keep him away from them: every week, one of his sisters would mail him, wherever he was, a postal order for a few shillings. It was never enough. When he could no longer afford the price of a low lodging house, he sought admission to the local workhouse. Once, denied admission to one of these in Somerset, he deliberately smashed a window so that he would spend the night in jail. Occasionally he was able to gain temporary admission to the local lunatic asylum, as he had once done in Dublin.

And at one point in his wanderings Maclean aspired to the patronage of Victoria herself. In 1877, while living at a lodging house in Guildford, Maclean composed a verse for her and sent it to Buckingham Palace. While Maclean may or may not have known that the poem's execrable meter, logic, grammar, and spelling would hardly appeal to the Queen, he must have been sure that its subject would strike a chord, for it was the one closest to her heart: her undying love and lifelong mourning for Albert:

On your thrown you set and rule us all,

By justice you make known

All your power, and the people like

To cheer the Queen they call their own,

When your lamented husband left us,

And went were troubles find no share,

How we felt for you and tried too lessen

The sting of bad fate you had to bare,

But God who knows whats for our best

Sent you comfort in your most trying hour,

And made you bare your troubles as a nobly woman

should, And the people showed their love, and liked your power.

When History tells, of your good reign,

They will think of you and say,

Its the Queen who made her people happy,

By affection and justice thats how she ruled the sway.

Maclean was unable to remain in his Guildford lodging house long enough for a reply, as his landlady, alarmed when Maclean showed her a dagger he carried in his sleeve to “take care of himself,” threw him out. Thus he never heard from the Queen, and almost certainly resumed his wanderings with a growing sense that Victoria scorned him as much as everyone else did.
*

For more than four years he anxiously walked the length and breadth of Britain, and beyond: to Boulogne, France; throughout Germany: even perhaps to Jamaica, where according to one report he passed as Roderigues Maclean. It did not matter how far away he went, for he endured the same hellish cycle everywhere. He
would enter a new town seeking anonymity and peace, but before long a stranger would recognize him and would flaunt some article of blue clothing in his face. The word then quickly spread, and he was recognized, accosted, despised, and insulted by all. He would flee to another town, and the torture would begin again. In 1880, thus beset in the town of Weston-super-Mare, he reached a breaking point, and he spilled out his anguish in a letter to his sister Annie:

Dear Annie,—I have no doubt but that you will be somewhat surprised to receive another letter from me, but as the English people have continued to annoy me, I thought I would write, as you should not be surprised if anything unpleasant occurred, as the people being so antagonistically inclined toward me, makes me raving mad. I can hardly contain myself in fact. I mean, if they don't cease wearing blue, I will commit murder.… The pain and anguish that I passed the other night I could not describe. Perhaps by the time you receive this I shall be in prison. I really think I cannot prevent myself having revenge on the English people. I don't mind a bit if they hanged me, as now I see things in a different light. They only pretend to be friendly to annoy and cause untold misery. I fear it will be just as bad in Boulogne or elsewhere. What chance have I to cope with the millions of people who are against me? Not merely against me, I should not mind that, but at open defiance and publicly annoying me on every possible occasion. What a confounded fool I must have been to say anything about it or wear blue at the time. From your former words I thought the people had a more forgiving nature, but I perceive I was deceived in them all. I intend to carry my determination into effect to-day (Monday), and after it's done, I shall write you a letter. Of course I shall
not remove nor give myself up, but doubtless they will take me into custody the next day. If I cannot commit a murder (I really assure you, Annie, I mean what I write) in one way, I will in another way. All I can add is, if there is more difficulty, there may be more victims.

Annie Maclean and her sister Caroline, deeply alarmed by this letter, telegraphed Roderick begging him to desist, and quickly arranged for a local surgeon to examine him, sign a certificate of lunacy, and commit him to the Bath and Somerset Lunatic Asylum.
*
He remained there for fourteen months, happier to be in an asylum than anywhere else—but even there fearing contact with perfidious attendants and visitors.

In July 1881, Maclean was discharged from the asylum as cured, and immediately resumed his frantic wandering. Apparently avoiding London altogether—the massive population there, he wrote Annie, made things “a thousand times worse”—he tramped through southern England, preferring the coastal towns, moving from Chichester to Brighton to Eastbourne to Croydon, and back to Brighton, where he spent a month in the local workhouse. While there, he wrote a letter to Annie complaining that horrible pains in his head were driving him insane, and asking her again to get him into an asylum. From her he received no answer; instead, he got a deeply disturbing letter from his brother Hector, who told Roderick that he refused to be his brother's keeper any longer: he had his own three children to look after.

When the workhouse authorities at Brighton threatened to transfer Maclean to Kensington, his home parish workhouse, Maclean fled west to Southsea, outside of Portland. There he found a room in the poorer part of town, in the home of Mrs. Sorrell. Mrs. Sorrell remembered him as quiet at first, but desperate to prove his
respectability: he claimed to be a writer and poet employed by the
West Sussex Gazette
. It was not long before his landlady concluded he was a man “with a tile loose.” Nonetheless, for the dozen or so days he remained in Southsea, Maclean got on amazingly well with her and with his fellow lodger Edward Hucker. By day he wandered the town or paced the cold and windy beach, where across the blue-gray bay he could see the Isle of Wight, see even the shore of Victoria's Osborne estate. By night he entertained Sorrell and Hucker with a little concertina that he had obtained in Brighton, and with a little ventriloquist routine, pretending to speak with an imaginary sweep in the chimney. He also conversed freely with the two, and Sorrell and Hucker both remembered Maclean as being deeply engaged in the politics of the day. He would lecture them on political economy until they could take it no more. He was a great admirer of Prime Minister Gladstone. In spite of—or perhaps because of—his special relationship with God, he declared himself to be a freethinker. And he was a passionate supporter of the ultraradical politician Charles Bradlaugh.

Charles Bradlaugh had been elected MP for Northampton in the general election of 1880, which had swept Gladstone and the Liberals back into power. Because, however, he was an outspoken atheist, he was prohibited either from affirming or taking his oath, and thus from taking his seat. For two years he had repeatedly presented himself in the House of Commons to take
the oath, but his atheism, his republicanism, and his scandalous advocacy of birth control ensured that a majority of the Commons supported a measure each time to refuse to let him take the oath or his seat. Twice Bradlaugh was forcibly removed from the House of Commons. Once so far, he had been forced to run for reelection to regain his seat. During Maclean's stay in Southsea—on 21 February 1882—Bradlaugh scandalized the nation by attempting to force the issue: since no one would give him the oath, he decided to take it himself. He strode up to the Table of the House and pulled from his pocket a Bible and a piece of paper from which he read the oath. As the House erupted into an uproar, he kissed the Bible, signed the paper, gave it to the Clerk, and took his seat. The House adjourned in confusion. The next day, Bradlaugh was expelled from the House and his parliamentary seat was vacated. He would have to be re-elected a second time to take his seat in the House. (This by-election was taking place on the very day—2 March 1882—that Roderick Maclean had invaded the first-class waiting room of Windsor railway station.)