Shooting Victoria (63 page)

At the Borough police station that morning, the discovery of the bullet apparently alarmed Roderick Maclean: after a sleepless but quiet night, soon after the news of the discovery reached the station house, Maclean called Superintendent Hayes to his cell. The realization that he might now face the death penalty concentrated his mind wonderfully. He wished to make a statement, he told Hayes. The Superintendent had pen, ink, and paper brought, and watched as Maclean wrote:

I am not guilty of the charge of shooting with the intention of causing actual bodily harm. My object was by frightening the Queen to alarm the public, with the result of having my grievances respected—viz., such as the pecuniary straits in which I have been situated. All the circumstances tend to prove this statement. Firstly, had I desired to injure the Queen I should have fired at her when she was quitting the railway carriage. Quite on the contrary, I pointed the pistol on a level with the wheels: but as I felt a slight kick, doubtless the contents may have lodged in one of the doors.

If Her Majesty will accept this explanation, and allow the words “with intent to intimidate her,” instead of “with intent to cause grievous bodily harm,” to be inserted in that count, I will offer all the assistance in my power to bring the charge herein specified to a speedy issue.

I hope Her Majesty will accept the only consolation I can offer—namely, I had no intention whatever of causing her any injury.

Roderick Maclean

With this promise that he would make things easy for Queen and government in return for a lesser charge, Maclean thought he had worked out a deal. That notion he considered confirmed when he asked Hayes, before he handed him the letter, whether he would be charged with a capital offense.

“Certainly not,” Hayes told him.

He was thus a confident man when at 1:30 that afternoon, handcuffed to a plain-clothed officer, he was rushed in an open fly from the station house to Windsor Town Hall. Since the town magistrates had cleverly announced publicly that the examination would take place at least two hours after it actually did, Maclean rode happily unbothered by the now-usual Windsor mob. The police and the Home Office had already been busy putting together a case against him, and the Solicitor to the Treasury, Augustus Stephenson, was present at the Town Hall to examine witnesses.

Stephenson quickly disabused Maclean that he had struck any sort of deal, stating at the start that Maclean was charged with shooting at the Queen with intent to murder her. Then he quickly brought forward three witnesses, enough to justify a remand for a week, as the police had already uncovered evidence pointing to Maclean's serious mental illness. At this examination, however, there was no testimony whatever about that, Stephenson instead
questioning the three witnesses simply to establish that Maclean had indeed shot at the Queen. Two of the witnesses—Superintendent Hayes and the photographer James Burnside, who had wrestled away Maclean's gun—both claimed that they had seen Maclean pointing his gun at the Queen's carriage. Burnside's recollection in particular was remarkable for its specificity: “I saw the prisoner with a revolver in his hand. The line of fire was straight from my eye to one of the panels of Her Majesty's carriage.”

Maclean, however, saw the flaw in their evidence and energetically exploited it, exercising his right to cross-examine witnesses by subjecting all of them to a thorough and—all agreed—highly intelligent cross-examination, to establish that none of the three had actually seen him shoot; the fact that two of them had seen where his pistol was pointing after the shot offered no proof whatsoever of where it had been pointing before. In cross-examining Hayes, Maclean asked him to give him back his revolver so that he could demonstrate how he held it when he shot. “No, thank you,” Hayes replied. So Maclean used his shabby hat instead to demonstrate that he had been pointing downwards. “You do me an injustice if you were to condemn me on such a point as that,” Maclean said. He then used Hayes's extensive experience with firearms to debunk the idea that he had necessarily shot at the Queen.

Have you fired a pistol in your life?—Some hundreds.

Perhaps you are aware that pistols jump?—Yes, that is so.

The pistol might have been in a very different position after I fired it to what it was before?—That is very possible.

“That is a point in my favor,” Maclean claimed triumphantly. It might have been. But it made no difference to the magistrates, who considered that they had evidence enough for a remand of a week
charging Maclean with intending to murder the Queen. Maclean protested that he had cooperated on the understanding that his charge would be lowered to intimidation, not murder. “We have nothing to do with that,” replied the mayor.

And so Maclean returned to the station house sure that the world had wronged him once again, a conclusion strengthened by his rough treatment along the way: during the examination a hostile crowd had gathered outside the Town Hall, and when police escorted Maclean out and into a carriage ringed with constables, some of the crowd rushed at the carriage and battled the police in order to overturn it; Maclean felt the terror of impending death for a couple of minutes, before the police regained control and hurried him away from the chasing and tormenting mob. The next evening, too, Maclean's paranoid delusions appeared to have become reality, as he was transferred to the county jail at Reading to await the completion of his examination. Superintendent Hayes, attempting to avoid confrontation by avoiding Windsor train station altogether, removed Maclean from the station in a closed fly through Eton and to the railway station at Slough. He was recognized there, and a hostile crowd quickly grew. He was kept out of sight in the station's booking office until the train arrived.

Meanwhile, not a full day had passed after the shooting before Victoria and Gladstone bickered. Touched by the overwhelming public and foreign response to her escape, the Queen fully expected her Parliament to follow suit and present her with a joint congratulatory address: anything less, she thought, would have a “
painful effect.
” The last Parliamentary joint address had taken place a full forty years before, after Francis's attempts. Robert Peel had put an end to these, of course, for practical reasons, doing his best to minimize the pomp following each attempt in order to discourage imitators. Peel's disciple Gladstone agreed with him then, and agreed with him now. So when Victoria requested that her secretary convey
her desire to Gladstone, her prime minister quickly attempted in a response to Ponsonby to pour cold water on the idea:

As respects an address, the dominant feeling in my mind has been that the whole of these deplorable attempts on the life of the Queen have proceeded from men of weak and morbid minds: that to such minds notoriety is the very highest reward and inducement that can be offered.…the best means of dealing with these cases are to keep from them what feeds the vain imagination and to administer sharp judicial sentences.

Gladstone rejected the idea of an address with the best of intentions, wishing only to protect Victoria as Peel had done. But Victoria's relationship with Peel was nothing like her relationship with Gladstone, and she could not help but understand his thinking to be at best insensitive, and at worst mistaken, and typical of his enmity toward her. The discovery of the bullet on this Friday, however, fortunately put an end to their argument before it escalated. That discovery convinced the Attorney General, Henry James, that Maclean's act was that of a traitor, and that he ought to be tried for attempted murder of the Queen, not for the high misdemeanour of annoying her. Knowing this, and believing that this attempt had become in the eyes of the public more serious than previous ones, Gladstone reversed himself, and the Cabinet, meeting on Saturday, agreed to follow the precedents of 1840 and 1842. On the following Monday, Commons and Lords each overwhelmingly approved of the address, and on Friday, a small Parliamentary delegation took the train to Windsor Castle to present it to her in a small ceremony.

Victoria was satisfied with Parliament, and told Gladstone so. Parliament's was not the first address to be presented, however, and likely not the most satisfying one. On Monday the sixth, before Parliament had even voted for their address, the boys of
Eton presented theirs. At 10:30 that morning, the entire school unknowingly appropriated Roderick Maclean's great number: ranked in rows of four, the nearly nine hundred students marched out of the college, across the Thames, and up to Castle Hill, where they formed a ring in the Quadrangle about the Queen's private entrance. At 11:00 they sent up a tremendous cheer as Victoria appeared, flanked by Leopold and Arthur. The address was then read “extremely well,” in Victoria's opinion, by the two boys who wrote it—followed by an even louder volley of cheers, one echoed by the public outside of the walls. Victoria, “visibly affected,” replied briefly to the address, and then called forth Leslie Robertson and Gordon Chesney Wilson, the two boys who had loyally belabored Maclean with their umbrellas. She shook the hands of her young saviors.

Later that afternoon, Victoria lunched with the beautiful, restless, and peripatetic Empress Elisabeth, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. Elisabeth, a devoted huntress, had been riding to the hounds in Cheshire for the past month, and had come on her way back to the Continent to offer Victoria her congratulations and her farewells. Arthur, Leopold, Helena, and Beatrice met her at the station. The Prince and Princess of Wales came up by train from London to Windsor especially for the occasion, and they with Victoria met Elisabeth at the castle's Sovereign's entrance. The two empresses and the royal family then ate for an hour before the younger children saw Elisabeth to the station and off to Paris. The meeting was by hindsight a poignant one. Victoria had encountered the final attempt upon her life; Elisabeth had yet to encounter hers. Sixteen years later, on 10 September 1898 in Geneva, Elisabeth and a lady-in-waiting were hurrying down the promenade before the lake in order to board a steamer bound for Caux when a burly man suddenly lurched at her, knocking her down. The Empress was helped up, boarded the ship, and collapsed. Her lady-in-waiting cut the very tight stays of her corset and discovered blood on her chemise: she had been stabbed. The man who attacked her, Luigi Lucheni, was an Italian anarchist
who when caught admitted that he was out to kill the first royal he could lay his hands upon. The fact that Elisabeth was traveling under a transparent incognito and subsequently lacked any security had given Lucheni his chance, and when he lurched at her he plunged into her body a short file sharpened to stiletto fineness, breaking her rib and piercing her lung, pericardium, and heart. The Empress quickly bled to death. The elderly Victoria, then at Balmoral, telegraphed her condolences to the devastated Austrian Emperor.

During the week between Roderick Maclean's two examinations by the magistrates of Windsor, press and police vied with one another to uncover the man's disturbed past. Every day the papers trumpeted new discoveries, all of them suggesting that Maclean was seriously mentally ill. Before a day had passed after the shooting, Inspector Fraser of the Household Police received a telegram reporting Maclean's lengthy sojourn in Bath and Somerset Asylum; that news was widely reported the next day, along with Maclean's stays in a Dublin asylum as well as Weston-super-Mare infirmary. An attorney from Dover, Wollaston Knocker, recognized Maclean from the first reports of the shooting and quickly telegraphed the Mayor of Windsor to describe his defending Maclean eight years before from the charge of attempting to derail the train at Maidstone, and stating his decided opinion that Maclean was at that time insane. A few days later, Knocker's more detailed account of Maclean's earlier, bizarre behavior appeared in newspapers across the country. Reporters acting upon the discovery of a Southsea address in Maclean's pocket when he was searched tracked down Mrs. Sorrell and Mr. Hucker, who happily revealed to the world Maclean's “soft” behavior there. Maclean's homicidal gestures to his family, his paranoid and frantic letters to his sister Annie, tales—both actual and apocryphal—of his eccentric behavior in the several towns through which he had wandered: all of it poured from the press, an ocean of evidence to prove the man was mad.

The police and the government quickly reached the same conclusion. The Home Secretary, William Vernon Harcourt, did consider the possibility that Maclean was a part of a larger political conspiracy, when within hours after the shooting he received a letter claiming a connection between Maclean and Johann Most. Most was a notorious German anarchist living in London, who in his German-language newspaper
Freiheit
had welcomed with joy news of Tsar Alexander's assassination, and called for the assassination of another “crowned ragamuffin” every month. For this he was tried and convicted, and was now serving sixteen months in Clerkenwell Prison. Harcourt ordered Howard Vincent, the head of the Metropolitan Police's Criminal Investigations Department, to investigate the possible connection. Within forty eight hours Vincent, having accumulated an abundance of evidence of Maclean's mental instability, dismissed the possibility outright, informing Harcourt: “the present attempt on the life of Her Majesty the Queen was the work of a lunatic, whose antecedents have been fully ascertained, and is in no shape or form traceable to any English or Foreign political society.”

William Gladstone agreed: Maclean was a madman acting alone, not a member of a political conspiracy. When he introduced in Commons his motion for a joint address, he proclaimed as much, and more—claiming that
every
attempt upon the Queen had been one of apolitical madness. The horror one felt at learning the Queen had again been attacked, Gladstone proclaimed, was mitigated by one “remarkable consideration”:

—that whereas in other countries similar execrable attempts have at least been made by men of average, or more than average, sense and intelligence, and whereas there the real, or at any rate the supposed, cause has been private grievances or public mischief, in this country, in the case of Her Majesty, they have been wholly dissociated from grievances, wholly dissociated from
discontent, and upon no occasion has any man of average sense and average intelligence been found to raise his hand against the life of Her Majesty. On each occasion of the kind morbid minds, combined with the narrowest range of mental gifts, have been the apparent cause by which persons have been tempted to seek a notoriety denied to them in every legitimate walk of life.