Shooting Victoria (62 page)

The yard through which the royal party would take only a few steps was well patrolled. A number of constables from Westminster's A Division—assigned to royal protection and therefore traveling wherever the Queen did—were there. Also there were a number of officers of the Windsor Borough Police, keeping the road clear for the royal carriages from station to Castle. Their head, Chief Superintendent Hayes, stood at the verge of the yard, ready to signal to his sergeant at the moment the royal carriages set off, to stop the traffic on the busy street out of the station. While Victoria was well protected, then, the science of royal protection was still far from a perfect one. When she emerged from the station onto the road, every officer in the yard stopped surveying the crowd in order to look upon their Queen.

By her carriage, drawn by two gray ponies, Victoria could see her faithful Highland servant John Brown; he had let down the carriage stairs and was ready to hand her warm wraps for the short journey. Brown had aged visibly since he had earned his gold medal tackling Arthur O'Connor; he was stouter and suffered several chronic illnesses, of which the worst were pain and weakness in his legs and a nasty regular swelling of the face. His heavy drinking as well contributed to his debilitation. He had only a year to live. Ponsonby led Victoria to the door of the carriage, and Brown helped first her, and then Beatrice and Lady Roxburghe, inside. Victoria and Beatrice sat facing the horses, the Queen on the far side; Lady Roxburghe sat facing them. The carriage was closed because of the cold, but there was an open window on the door. Ponsonby left them to join the equerries in the second carriage; the maids of honor occupied the third. Brown put up the carriage steps and clambered, with some difficulty, onto the rumble seat.

The carriage set off as Victoria enjoyed the cheers of the crowd, the shouting of the boys from Eton, she thought, drowning out the rest. Beatrice, looking out of her side of the carriage, could see the
boys, and past them, apart from them, about forty feet away from her, a shabby-looking man: he stepped forward, raised a revolver that glimmered even in that gloaming, leveled it in their direction, and fired.

Victoria heard the sharp report; she thought it had come from a train engine. Then she saw commotion. All the crowd instantly turned its attention from the Queen's carriage to the shooter, who stood still, his arm outstretched, looking as if he were about to shoot again. One man in the crowd was stunned to recognize the man: he, the Rev. Mr. Archibald MacLachlan, was the good Samaritan who had revived Maclean, fed him, and sent him on his way a week before. As one, the crowd surged toward Maclean. Chief Superintendent Hayes, who was nine feet away from him, was the first to reach him, shouting “scoundrel!” and grabbing him by the neck. A young man named James Burnside, a Windsor photographer, jumped at Maclean from the other direction, grabbed him by the right wrist, and yanked his pistol hand down until it collided with Burnside's own thigh; he pushed at Maclean's fingers until Maclean released the pistol, and it clattered to the ground. Inspector Fraser and several of his officers ran up and held Maclean while the crowd fell angrily upon him. Two of the Eton boys, armed with umbrellas, belaboured Maclean over his head and shoulders with zeal but indiscriminate aim, smacking in the process at least one of Maclean's captors. Victoria, her carriage now rushing out of the station, had no idea what was going on but “saw people rushing about and a man being violently hustled.” Beatrice, who had seen it all, remained silent, not wanting to frighten her mother. Lady Roxburghe, whose perspective allowed her to see little, thought the whole thing a joke. The carriage sped up the hill, the other two carriages following: the men of the household in the second carriage and the ladies in the third all knew Maclean had fired a shot, and they rode on to the Castle fearing the worst.

The crowd—and particularly the Eton boys—wanted to lynch Maclean on the spot. The role of the police instantly shifted from
restraining Maclean to protecting him. They dragged the Eton boys away from him as Maclean cringed and cried “Don't hurt me—I will go quietly.” Followed by a hooting mass, they dragged Maclean up the road to Thames Street, where Superintendent Hayes sent an officer to the nearest cab stand for conveyance to the Borough police station.

Victoria's carriage in the meantime rushed up Castle Hill and into the yard. John Brown hopped off the rumble and ran to pull open the carriage door; with a “greatly perturbed face” and yet a calm voice, he declared “that man fired at your Majesty's carriage.” The equerry, McNeill, leapt from the second carriage and ran up “in a great state,” hoping that the Queen was untouched. He told her that the assailant had been caught. Victoria immediately ordered McNeill back to the station to see if anyone had been hurt. In spite of the excitement around her, Victoria was not at all affected by this attempt—nor would she be in the days to come. “Was not shaken or frightened,” she wrote in her journal that day—”so different to O'Connor's attempt, though [this] was infinitely more dangerous. That time I was terribly alarmed.” (Beatrice, on the other hand, was shaken enough in the coming days to delay the royal journey to the French Riviera.) Victoria, as usual, immediately set out to broadcast her own version of events before rumors began to fly. She hurried to tell her one child in the Castle—Arthur—what had happened. She then took tea with Beatrice while her account was telegraphed to the rest of her children and to other relatives. Ponsonby took it upon himself that evening to send two short telegrams and one longer letter about the shooting to the prime minister.

While the queen's carriage traveled on to the royal mews, to be scrutinized for bullet-marks, McNeill hurried back down the hill and offered up his carriage to transport Maclean to the station house. The police didn't need it; they had already obtained a hansom cab. Into this they thrust Maclean; Superintendent Hayes of the Windsor Police and Inspector Fraser of the Royal Household Police squeezed in on either side. The cab took off to the High Street
and to the station house on Sheet Street, the Eton boys running beside them hooting, and Maclean demonstrating visible anxiety the whole way. He had been starving, Maclean told his captors; otherwise, he would not have done this.

All the Queen's men—Ponsonby, Bridport, and McNeill—arrived at the police station at around the same time as Maclean, in order to see him charged. The news of the attack spread through the town quickly, and the Mayor of Windsor and a number of magistrates quickly made their way to the station as well. From the group of Eton boys, the two who had pummeled the captured Maclean with their brollies identified themselves to Ponsonby, and he took down their names. They were to become, to the press and the Queen both, the heroes of this day.

Maclean was talkative with the police at the station, freely stating his name and Windsor address and his place of birth, and he gave some idea about his movements over the past few weeks. Fraser and Hayes examined his gun: two chambers loaded; two recently discharged; two empty. He was searched; among the detritus in his pockets were his notebook, the note he had written in the waiting room, one penny and three farthings, and, wrapped in paper, fourteen live pin-fire cartridges, which fit his pistol. No bullet had been found at the station yet, and the examination of the Queen's carriage showed no bullet marks. Most of the newspapers the next day reported that Maclean likely shot a blank. But the police already had enough evidence to know better than that. Superintendent Hayes detained Maclean for shooting the Queen with intent to do her grievous bodily harm. Maclean seemed unimpressed: “Oh, the Queen,” he replied to the charge. His examination was set for the next day, before the mayor and magistrates at the Town Hall. Maclean was forced to wash himself—an action that improved his appearance considerably. In his cell, he gratefully and voraciously fell upon a dinner of tea, bread, and butter. He seemed more relieved and content in jail than he had been while on the streets. A local surgeon,
William Brown Holderness, was brought in to examine him—and quickly pronounced him sane.

Although this was the first assault upon the Queen that had taken place outside the center of London, thanks to the telegraph, news of this attempt spread quickly, reaching London within minutes. As they had done after every other attempt, the gentry set out in their carriages to offer their congratulations to the Queen.
Where
to go, exactly, since the Queen was not in residence in London, was the question. Most dealt with the difficulty by clogging the Mall to leave their regards both at Buckingham Palace and at the Prince of Wales's residence. Several diplomats who attempted to offer up personal congratulations at the Palace were directed to call at Marlborough House instead. (Others made their way by train to Windsor Castle the next day.) The House of Commons churned for a time that evening with a growing consternation as vague reports about the shooting arrived before Ponsonby's official word did; Gladstone and several ministers, on hearing the rumor, consulted and then rushed from the House to learn further details. When one of Ponsonby's telegrams was placed in Gladstone's hands, he quickly passed it around to his colleagues and to the speaker, quelling the stir. The government quickly sent a reply to Windsor expressing their “profound gratification” for the Queen's escape. Gladstone wrote to Ponsonby personally that evening, expressing his earnest desire that Maclean would suffer a much harsher penalty than O'Connor had a decade before: “I hope the matter will not receive the same sort of judicial handling which a similar one as I recollect received from Mr. Justice Cleasby.” From the start, Gladstone wanted the Queen to understand that her government would do its best this time to deal with the assailant according to her desires.

The news spread quickly beyond the metropolis as well, its broadcasting helped by the fact that many had collected outside newspaper offices throughout Britain to hear the results of Bradlaugh's bid for re-election in Northampton. (To Maclean's
gratification and Victoria's dismay, Bradlaugh had won.) And via an efficient world-wide telegraphic system, the news traveled quickly throughout the world as well—so quickly that one awed newsman posited the lightning dispersal as a sign of miraculous times and the harbinger of a wondrous future:

I have before me as I write a copy of an evening paper published in San Francisco on March 2nd, and this paper contains a series of telegrams giving full particulars of the attempt to shoot the Queen, which took place at Windsor at half-past five on the afternoon of the same day. The news, it need scarcely be said, had outstripped by many hours the movement of the daylight, and the people of California were actually reading in their printed newspaper all about Maclean's attempt upon the life of the Queen before the hour at which that attempt took place in England. This fact is of itself sufficiently remarkable, and yet I am not without authority for saying that before long other wonders of science still more marvellous will demand the astonished admiration of the world.

As the news spread, messages of sympathy and congratulations returned in an unprecedented flood, jamming the special telegraph wire to the castle: the Queen herself counted 138 telegrams on the Friday, and 68 on the Saturday. Among these was a telegram from the Tsar of Russia, who had been personally informed about the attempt by his brother-in-law Prince Alfred. She received messages as well as from the King of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, and the legislatures in Spain, Greece, Bucharest, and Ottawa. Before two days had passed, several congratulatory messages arrived from Australia. In the United States, several newspapers responded to the attempt by reminding readers about Victoria's heartfelt sympathy to Lucretia Garfield upon the death of her husband—and
Victoria was particularly affected by President Chester Arthur's message to her. And postbags bulging with congratulations soon joined the telegrams. Ironically the Queen, never more secluded from the world in the wake of an attempt, was never more taxed in responding to the world's congratulations. “Telegrams, as well as letters,” she wrote in her journal on 3 March, “pouring in to that extent that I literally spent my whole day in opening and reading them.” Actually, after four o'clock that day, the Queen managed to break away from her correspondence to walk with Beatrice to the mausoleum at Frogmore, where they knelt by Albert's tomb and offered up prayers of thanksgiving for the Queen's preservation. After that, they rode out in an open carriage, purposefully leaving the usual paths of the Park to ride among the people of Windsor and of Eton where, Victoria wrote, “the boys cheered as we passed … and everyone seemed so pleased.” The tonic effect upon the Queen of the spontaneous public acclaim after this attempt had not diminished a bit from every earlier attempt. It was after this one that Victoria finally summed up the curious joy she felt after each of the attempts against her: “anything like the enthusiasm, loyalty, sympathy and affection shown me is not to be described,” she wrote to her daughter Vicky. “It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”

At around 9:00 the morning after the shooting came a discovery that changed everything: the bullet had been found by Inspector Noble of the Great Western Railway, lying in the mud of the rail yard, about thirty yards from the spot where Maclean had stood. It had obviously struck a truck before falling to the ground, taking on a smudge of white paint. That truck had moved on to Reading, but Inspector Noble found it there that afternoon, and concluded that it had struck the white painted number of the truck at a height of 5' 5”—a level shot, one capable of striking the Queen. These discoveries raised one question—how could Maclean have missed the carriage?—the apparent answer to which was that the bullet passed
between the rear of the carriage and the rumble seat—between Victoria and John Brown, in other words. Wherever the bullet went, it was now clear that Maclean had fired live ammunition in the general direction of the Queen. The afternoon of the discovery, John Brown interrupted Victoria's enormous task of correspondence by showing her Maclean's pistol; “it could be fired off in rapid succession with the greatest facility,” she noted. That, and the news of the missing bullet, surprisingly brought the Queen relief, “for it proves,” she wrote, “that the object was not intimidation, but far worse.” In other words, as far as she was concerned, Maclean had tried to murder her. She would not have to worry about any misdemeanor charges this time, which might result in Maclean's being given a paltry one-year sentence, as O'Connor had. Maclean was a traitor and would be tried as one.