Shooting Victoria (64 page)

His implication was clear: the very thought of harming the Queen was irrational. Other nations with their lesser rulers and lesser systems suffered political. discontent to an extent that the threat of political assassination was a reality. But not in Britain, where such extremities of discontent were simply not possible, and where Victoria's popularity was so solidly established that only the weak-minded could entertain the notion of harming her. Gladstone's conclusion, of course, rested upon the absurd premise that politics—at least British politics—were by definition rational. Given the example of the recent antics in Parliament with Bradlaugh's attempts to get in and with the attempts of the Irish nationalist MPs to bring business to a standstill, let alone the excesses on both sides that Fenianism had engendered—or the example in 1872 of Arthur O'Connor's Fenian-inspired lunacy—that premise could not bear the slightest scrutiny. But no one was in a mood to scrutinize it, at least when it came to the Queen: in 1882 her popularity was so solidly established that any attempt to harm her could only be explained away as madness. No clearer evidence exists as to the enormous growth of the popularity of the Queen and the monarchy since the uneasy life and abrupt death of British republicanism a decade before.

Thus convinced of Maclean's insanity, Gladstone, Harcourt, and Attorney General Henry James had, long before the man's second examination, let alone his trial, decided exactly how they would handle his case. The fact that he actually shot at the Queen mandated that he be tried for treason. But the evidence of his
insanity was so overwhelming that an insanity defense was sure to succeed—and that would in effect guarantee Maclean permanent imprisonment at Broadmoor, ensuring that, unlike Arthur O'Connor, he could never bother the Queen again. The government, therefore, had no reason to contest an insanity plea. On 9 March, the day before Maclean's second examination, Gladstone wrote Victoria to justify his government's course. “Your Majesty's Law Officers are sensible how important it is that there should be in this case a power of imprisonment without any limit of time.” Therefore,

It is thought by far the most probable … that the friends of Maclean will defend him on the ground of insanity. And the Law Officers seem at present not inclined to resist that plea
à l'outrance
. For, if it be admitted, the man may be imprisoned without limit of time; whereas, if it were overthrown, the parties might be driven to another line of defence, and might try to show that the intent was only to alarm. For, if by any chance a jury were to accept this plea, the term of imprisonment would be limited and comparatively short.

Victoria, writing in her journal the next day, seemed to agree with this strategy. Actually, she betrayed a serious misunderstanding of her prime minister's words: “if there should be any fear of his not being convicted for intent to murder,” she wrote, “the plea of insanity will be brought forward; this might be accepted in order to ensure his incarceration for life.” While Gladstone attempted to inform Victoria that the Attorney General would abandon altogether any serious attempt to convict Maclean, Victoria thought that they would indeed make their best case that he was guilty of High Treason, and only concede insanity if conviction for treason proved to be impossible. She would certainly prefer that the state establish the man's guilt, for while her subjects might find relief in thinking Maclean mad, she adamantly refused to consider
him anything but sane—as she had considered all of her assailants. Maclean might have “a horrid, cruel face.” He might be the “utterly worthless” offshoot of “respectable relations.” But, as the Queen wrote to her daughter Vicky, “The wretched man is strange and wicked but not mad. He had fourteen bullets on him, and the act was clearly premeditated.” As far as she was concerned, if he thought the crime through, he was sane, and thus a traitor, and the Queen expected her government to make every effort to establish his guilt. When five days later, on her way to France, she wrote Gladstone “she is glad to hear of this proposed arrangement for the trial of Maclean w
^h
seems very satisfactory,” she only deepened the misunderstanding between them by signaling approval of a course of which she manifestly did not approve. A collision between the two was inevitable.

By his second examination, on 10 March, Roderick Maclean had had a change of heart. Gone was the fire he displayed in his first examination, when he fought to establish a lesser charge. Since then he had resigned himself to an insanity plea and had relinquished the fighting to others. He entered the Town Hall certain he had legal representation, and indeed there were a solicitor and barrister in attendance, engaged by Maclean's brothers. They were not there to defend Maclean, however, but were there to look after Maclean family interests. It was not until after the examination of the first witness that Maclean realized he was unrepresented:

The Mayor (to the prisoner) Have you any question to put to the witness?

Prisoner—I understand I am represented by a solicitor.

The Mayor—You are not represented by a solicitor. He only represents your family.

Prisoner—I leave the case entirely in their hands.

Mr. Haynes [the family solicitor]—You reserve your defence?

Prisoner—I reserve my defence.

He was as good as his word, declining to cross-examine a single witness. His silence guaranteed that he would be tried for treason and not for a high misdemeanor, as he left undisputed the highly disputable evidence that he had fired a bullet at the Queen with intent to injure her. Treasury Solicitor Augustus Stephenson again represented the Crown, examining several witnesses to the attack (including the two umbrella-wielding Etonians) and others who established that Maclean had bought the pistol. Stephenson had little to say about Maclean's state of mind besides noting that, as far as he could tell, there was nothing the matter with the man. Maclean was read the charge: high treason. “I reserve my defence,” he said, and was led away.

twenty-four

S
PECIAL
V
ERDICT

R
oderick Maclean's trial was set for the next assizes in Reading—set, specifically, for 19 April, more than five weeks after his second examination. It was to be by Special Commission, so that the Lord Chief Justice, John Coleridge, could preside in company with the judge of the Assize, Baron Huddleston.
*
In the interim Maclean, the Queen, and the public found their own ways to divert themselves.

Maclean, when his time wasn't occupied by the several alienists that both the Crown and his solicitor sent to interview him, wrote an autobiography, which he titled
Yestern: or The Story of My Life and Reminiscences
. He apparently wished this narrative of his idyllic childhood, his disturbed adulthood, and his special
relationship with God to help with his defense, as he argued in it both that he had no intention of whatsoever of shooting the Queen, and that he had long been, and still was, insane. He wished more than this, however, if his overblown prose and his later repeated but unsuccessful attempts to get the manuscript published are any indication: he apparently sought to gain with it the literary fame he knew he so greatly deserved.

Victoria's diversion was her first visit to the French Riviera. She left her subjects with a letter published in the newspapers on 14 March “to express from her heart how very deeply touched she is by the outburst of enthusiastic loyalty, affection, and devotion which the painful event of the 2d. inst. has called forth from all classes and from all parts of her vast Empire.” The same morning, she and Beatrice rode to the station under greatly increased security, constables sent from London lining the route, and the station itself closed altogether to the public. Similar precautions were taken at Portsmouth. Two days later, Queen and Princess were in Mentone, where security was lighter, and in which the Queen delighted in riding in an open carriage about the countryside, writing to Vicky of “the bright sunshine and the sea, mountains, vegetation and lightness of the air and the brightness and gaiety of everything.” Only John Brown marred the otherwise entirely relaxing journey. Rumors that three Fenian terrorists were on their way from Paris to assassinate Victoria had reached the ears of the police who accompanied her, but they dismissed these rumors as spurious. John Brown did not, and drove everyone to distraction by his frantic attempts to discover the assassins. Victoria attributed his hypervigilance not to any actual threat, but to “his increasing
hatred
of being ‘abroad' which blinds his admiration of the country even.” Victoria and Beatrice returned to Windsor amidst the same heightened security, four days before Maclean's trial.

In the meantime, public attention was absolutely captivated by a drama that had been building for some time, which competed for column inches in the newspapers with Maclean's attempt, and
which in the days before Maclean's trial grew into London's
cause célèbre
of 1882: the Jumbo craze. That the simple transfer of an elephant from Regent's Park Zoo to a circus in New York became a sensational international incident should come as no surprise, for Jumbo had a great publicist—the greatest publicist that ever lived: P. T. Barnum. Barnum and his associates, having the year before merged to create a greater “Greatest Show on Earth,” had sent agents across America and Europe in search of new, bigger and better exhibits. Their agent in London had negotiated with the Zoological Society of London for a £2,000 sale of the largest living exhibit he found—Jumbo, reputedly the largest African elephant then in captivity. The Zoological Society was relieved to see Jumbo go, for the elephant had reached the age of sexual maturity and had already experienced musth, a condition common to adult male elephants caused by copious hormonal release, and manifesting itself in violently destructive rages; last August, Jumbo had destroyed the zoo's elephant house. A return of that condition—and the possible need to destroy the elephant—was only a matter of time.

Jumbo, however, apparently had his own opinion about leaving the zoo. When in mid-February he was led from his paddock to the crate especially designed to wheel him across London and aboard ship, he balked and refused to enter. When led out the next day to walk the eight miles to Millwall Docks, Jumbo similarly refused, uttering loud cries of distress, sinking to the ground and laying upon his side, grunting. “Shame,” onlookers cried out. The press and the public began to take note. At the same time that Roderick Maclean made his way to Windsor and bided his time there, London focused on the elephant's plight, and visits to the zoo skyrocketed. Members of the Society sued to keep Jumbo in London—and many pleaded with Barnum to let Jumbo stay. Barnum did his best to stoke the flames of publicity, on both sides of the Atlantic, making public all of his correspondence, spreading rumors about the elephant, perhaps even manufacturing letters supposedly from
British children, pleading with him to relent. The resulting furor both increased revenues at the zoo and created a fever of anticipation in the United States ensuring for Barnum's circus a wildly successful season. In mid-March, Jumbo fever peaked, as on one day 24,007 people packed the zoo—a dozenfold more than had come on the same day the previous year. Finally, on 22 March, Jumbo deigned to enter the box; with difficulty he was chained, crated, slowly trundled across the metropolis to St. Katharine's Dock, where he was set on a barge and two days later hoisted aboard ship. Two days after that he sailed for New York. Once the elephant had left, Jumbo fever subsided quickly, the British sheepishly realizing that they could go on without Jumbo, as Americans began to think they couldn't. By the date of the trial, then, Barnum and his elephant no longer competed for column inches with Roderick Maclean.

When on 19 April two constables conveyed Maclean up from the subterranean passage and into the dock of the small courtroom at Reading, he appeared dirtier and shabbier than ever, wearing his faded green-gray overcoat with its soiled once-velvet collar left open to reveal a ratty shirt and a frayed black tie. His demeanor was equally pathetic, betraying his sense of terror at being surrounded by the enemies who had packed the courtroom. His hands fidgeted ceaselessly; his eyebrows twitched, as his vacant eyes wandered nervously about the courtroom, from judge to jury to counsel, and upwards to the gallery, where on one side a number of fashionably dressed ladies stared back at him, some through opera glasses. “Few who looked upon him,” his attorney later wrote, “had any doubt that insanity had marked him for its own.” Maclean's brothers could easily have provided him with a respectable suit for the trial: they had otherwise provided for him well, paying for his meals at Reading Gaol and for the services of their solicitor and two barristers, including one of the most capable and renowned—and expensive—criminal attorneys of the day, Montagu Williams. But
family, attorneys, and Maclean himself had agreed he would plead insanity. And Maclean's rags, the regalia of his distraction, served his case best: and so they remained.

From early that morning, there had been a crush at all of the courthouse entrances. Those admitted had apparently been selected for their respectable appearances, one reporter comparing the spectators to a Nonconformist congregation. They were notable, as well, for their overt conservatism. This day, as it happens, was the first anniversary of Benjamin Disraeli's death,
*
and many in the courtroom both honored his memory and signified their adherence to his principles by carrying bouquets of primroses, Disraeli's favorite flower. The Queen had that morning done the same, sending a primrose wreath to be placed on his grave at Hughenden.
**
Maclean's agitation could not have been lessened by these symbols of allegiance to another cause—the blue ones in particular.

There had been growing public nervousness about Maclean's trial. This was the first time one of Victoria's assailants was being tried for treason since John Francis, forty years before. All of Robert Peel's reservations then about providing an attention-seeking scoundrel with the elevated trappings of a State Trial—and thus encouraging other addle-brained attention-seekers—poured forth from the press in the days leading up to this trial. “We cannot help regretting,” proclaimed
The Times
, “that the accused has been treated so much
au sérieux
, and that, instead of placing Maclean on a sort of pedestal, he could not have been sent to quarter Sessions to be dealt with in a sharp and summary fashion.” It was all too much: the presence of the Lord Chief Justice, as well as a large team of prosecutors headed by the Attorney-and Solicitor-Generals;
the very charge of High Treason with its awful sentence—it was “like employing a five ton Nasmyth hammer to crack a walnutshell,” according to one newspaper. More than this, there were fears that this trial would repeat the excesses of an insanity trial that had finished just two months before, and thus that was fresh in everyone's minds: Charles Guiteau's trial for the murder of President Garfield, which had been widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic. During the ten-week trial, Guiteau had acted as his own co-counsel, and with his constant interruptions, his badgering and belittling of attorneys on both sides, his vainglorious week-long pontification from the witness stand, and his dogged insistence upon reading long passages from a book he had written, or rather plagiarized, Guiteau had managed to turn the trial into a circus before his guilt was finally established and he was sentenced to hang.