Shooting Victoria (66 page)

And Gladstone, eager to rehabilitate his ever-more deeply dysfunctional relationship with the Queen, set out quickly to do just that. In his letter to her the day after the shooting, he expressed himself “deeply impressed with the gravity of the subject.” While he did say he was unsure whether such a change could be legally made, he promised to consult with the highest legal authorities about the matter. Within the next fortnight he had met with the Attorney General and the Lord Chief Justice. Telling them that he concurred absolutely with Victoria's position that the stigma of guilt would prevent “dangerous misapprehensions in morbid minds,” he energetically promoted the change. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge supported altering the law in this way, but only in cases of high treason, and not those of murder. Coleridge would consult with other high court judges; if they agreed, which seemed likely, Gladstone promised Victoria his ministry would see the change through Parliament.

In this way Gladstone and his government built up a little bit of good will with Victoria. But they squandered that good will completely, two weeks after the trial, when Gladstone and his Cabinet made the momentous decision to release Charles Stewart Parnell and the two other Irish nationalist MPs, whom they had ordered
arrested the previous October in the face of growing Irish agitation and agrarian violence. Since the time of Parnell's imprisonment without trial, violence in Ireland had only increased. Coercion, it seemed, was not working, and almost to a man Gladstone's Cabinet now favored a course of conciliation. Through intermediaries they had negotiated with Parnell and had reached an informal deal: if the government would continue with its reforms initiated with its Land Act of the year before, Parnell would support them, and would speak out against the violent outrages plaguing Ireland. Only one member of the Cabinet refused to be a party to the release, and resigned—W. E. Forster, the violently coercionist Chief Secretary for Ireland.

Victoria was a hardline coercionist as well, and Gladstone attempted to break the news to her gently, informing her on the first of May of the Cabinet's decision, arguing that “this measure will tend to peace and security in Ireland”; the next day, he sent Granville on a special train for an audience and to obtain her consent for the release. Granville, she noted, was very nervous, and Victoria was not happy. She “
very reluctantly
” gave her consent, “but said it was a great mistake.” She then wrote to voice her reservations to Gladstone: releasing Parnell would have, she thought, the opposite effect to the one Gladstone expected: “The Queen cannot but feel that it will have the effect of a triumph to Home Rule and of great weakness. She trusts she may be mistaken as to the results of this course, but she much dreads they will not be favourable to the maintenance of authority and respect of law and order.”

That day, Parnell and his two colleagues were released. W. E. Forster was replaced by Lord Frederick Cavendish, who happened to be the husband of Gladstone's niece Lucy. Two days later, as Cavendish and the newly appointed Viceroy, Earl Spencer, prepared to cross over to Dublin, Victoria learned to her amazement that her government was making a further, and to her a dangerous, conciliatory move. She shot a telegram to Gladstone: “Is it possible that M. Davitt, known as one of the worst of the treasonable agitators, is also to be released? I cannot believe it.” Her government
had already done enough to convince her that their radical actions were again doing damage to her Empire.

On 6 May, Earl Spencer and Lord Frederick Cavendish made what was to all appearances a triumphal entry into Dublin—” … certainly the best reception I ever got in Ireland,” Earl Spencer wrote to his wife; “The cheering was tremendous at times, and I would see many old friends at windows, etc.”

A few hours afterwards, Spencer wrote his wife again: “We are in God's hands. Do not be filled with alarm and fear.… I dare not dwell on the horror for I feel I must be unmanned.” Lord Frederick Cavendish had decided that evening to walk from his office at Dublin Castle to his residence in Phoenix Park. In the park, a cab crossed his path and stopped; Thomas Henry Burke—for thirteen years permanent Irish undersecretary, and so now Cavendish's assistant—hopped down to walk with him. As the two proceeded arm in arm, seven men approached them, passed, wheeled around, pulled out long, sharp knives, and fell upon Burke. “Ah, you villain!” cried Cavendish, and smacked one of the attackers in the face with his umbrella. They then turned upon him as well. Slashing and hacking at both men, the attackers inflicted gaping wounds upon Burke's and Cavendish's breasts, backs, necks, and arms. The seven attackers then melted away before passersby ran up to see Burke and Cavendish take their last breaths.

That night, Queen Victoria, who earlier had made her own triumphal procession through London in order to open Epping Forest as a park, learned the horrible news via two telegrams—the first reporting Burke dead but Cavendish alive, the second stating “All is over with Lord Frederick.” The murders were all she dreaded, clearly the fruits of Gladstone's destructive policies. She angrily laid out cause and effect in her journal: “How could Mr. Gladstone and his violent Radical advisers proceed with such a policy, which inevitably led to all this? Surely his eyes must be open now.” It did not matter to Victoria that Gladstone theorized (incorrectly, as it turned out) that the attackers were Irish-Americans and not
Irishmen, that the attackers were, it transpired, attacking Burke and not Cavendish, and that they had originally targeted the coercionist Forster before he left the country, that the murders horrified Parnell and certainly did not serve his interests, and that he both deplored them and quickly sought police protection. The Queen was certain: Phoenix Park proved that Gladstone and his cabinet were not simply aiding the enemy: they
were
the enemy. While Gladstone of course was devastated personally by the death of his niece's husband, the Queen could hardly restrain herself from launching a general attack on her government. At first, she did so through Granville, declaring to him on the day after the assassinations:

… she
cannot withhold
from him that
she
considers
this
horrible event the
direct result
of what she has always considered and has stated to Mr. Gladstone and to Lord Spencer as a most fatal and hazardous step.

She
must hold those
who recommended the release of not only the three Members of Parliament, but of many other suspects, as responsible for the lives of her subjects, and calls on the Government to take such strong measures as may give her and the country security, or at least as much security as possible.…

Two days later, and one day after Gladstone, crushed with grief, broke down in tears while speaking in the House of Commons of Cavendish, Victoria turned upon him: “She wishes now to express her
earnest
hope that he will make
no
concession to
those
whose Actions, Speeches & writings,
have produced
the present state of affairs in Ireland & who would be
encouraged
by weak and vacillating action to make
further demands.
”

She would find, however, that she could not quite bend her government to her will in this matter. They did introduce and pass a new coercion bill in the wake of the tragedy, but they also continued on the path of conciliation that the Queen deplored. By the end of
May the relationship between the Queen and her government had reached such a low point that Victoria took the most unusual step of enlisting her eldest son to intervene to save her and her nation from the government:

Dearest Bertie,—The state of affairs—this dreadfully Radical Government which contains many thinly-veiled
Republicans
—and the way in which they have truckled to the Home Rulers—as well as the utter disregard of all my opinions which after 45 years of experience ought to be considered, all make me very miserable, and disgust me with the hard, ungrateful task I have to go through and weigh on my health and spirits.… The mischief Mr. Gladstone does is
incalculable;
instead of
stemming
the current and downward course of Radicalism, which he could do
perfectly
, he
heads and encourages it
and alienates all the true Whigs and moderate Liberals from him. Patriotism is nowhere in their ranks.… You … should
speak
to
those
who
might and ought
, to act
differently
to what they do!

The Prince of Wales, however, could do little; Victoria and Gladstone would remain locked in their bitter relationship for three more years, until in 1885 another brutal killing—of General Gordon, in the Sudan—crippled the Liberal government and led to its fall. And even that was not the end; to Victoria's great dismay, Gladstone would serve as her prime minister twice more.

In the meantime, Gladstone kept to his promise to change the insanity verdict, though the progress of that change had slowed considerably as judges consulted and wording was agreed upon. By September 1882 this was done. Somehow during that time the scope of the proposed special verdict had grown; the change from the verdict not guilty by reason of insanity to “Guilty, but insane”
would now apply to every felony, not just treason. The consequence, of course, would remain exactly the same—detainment at the Queen's pleasure; it was the stigma that was new. The government at first attached this measure to a larger bill consolidating a number of criminal law reforms. That bill, introduced early in 1883, came to nothing. They then detached the measure and introduced it as a special bill. It quietly passed at the end of the session, in August 1883.

Life had become, if anything, less secure for Victoria between Maclean's trial and the passage of the Trial of Lunatics Act. At the beginning of 1883, Irish-American dynamitards had relaunched their bombing campaign, again targeting symbolic sites of British power. And in April John Brown had died, plunging the Queen into grief. “He protected me so, was so powerful and strong—that I felt so safe!” Victoria wrote to Vicky. She would be grateful, then, for any measure that protected her. Therefore, while she pointedly did not thank Gladstone for anything else that he had achieved in the busy parliamentary session of 1883, Victoria thanked him for this: “It will be,” she wrote, “a great security.”

Perhaps it was. Certainly, Victoria was never shot at or assaulted for the rest of her life, and the special verdict of “Guilty, but insane” never had to be applied in any case concerning her. Instead—and for the next eighty-one years—it applied to every poor insane soul who committed a felony. The first person stigmatized by this verdict was a woman with a history of mental disturbance, Johanna Culverwell, who was brought before the bar of the Old Bailey just three weeks after Victoria gave her royal assent to the change in the law.
*
Culverwell was charged with the death of her six-week-old son, whom she had placed in a pan of water, walked away, and returned to find drowned. After some
confusion as to the existence of the act, and then about the proper way to word the verdict, she was declared guilty, but insane. She, like Maclean, was detained at Victoria's pleasure. But she, unlike Maclean, was considered morally responsible for her action. So was every other mad felon until 1964, when the Trial of Lunatics Act was amended to its original verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

While Maclean's attempt did not lead to any further assaults upon Victoria, as she had feared it would, it certainly did lead to one final act of mayhem: an assault upon the language, perpetrated by the man widely considered to be the worst poet in English, and perhaps all languages: William McGonagall.

McGonagall and Maclean traveled oddly parallel courses in the years leading up to Maclean's attempt. Both heard voices in their heads: for McGonagall, it was his bedraggled and faulty muse, who came to him in a trance and ordered him to “Write! Write!” during the most “startling incident” of his life, in 1877, when he discovered his poetic calling. Both Maclean and McGonagall had grandiose notions about their talents, and both expected the public to marvel at their gifts. The public refused to comply, although McGonagall had the happier nature of the two and generally interpreted public ridicule as acclaim. Soon after his epiphany, McGonagall, like Maclean, submitted some of his verses to Victoria, hoping for patronage, perhaps even expecting to snatch the Poet Laureateship from Lord Tennyson. Like Maclean's, his efforts were rejected—by Keeper of the Privy Purse Lord Biddulph this time, rather than by Lady Biddulph, Maclean's curt correspondent. Biddulph politely thanked McGonagall for his submission, and that was enough to convince McGonagall, with his happier nature, that the Queen loved his work. This was enough in July 1878 to compel him to an epic journey from Dundee to Balmoral to entertain the Queen, who was then in residence. At the gate he was ridiculed and sent on his way, and threatened with arrest if he
ever returned. Undismayed, he lived the rest of his life certain of the Queen's patronage; for twenty-five years he played the part of a stealth poet-laureate, outdoing Tennyson in his startlingly prolific output of occasional poetry. He earned an insecure living by badgering patrons for donations and by reciting his poetry in halls, theatres, public houses, and for a time as a circus act, where he read while the audience was permitted to throw eggs, flour, dead fish, and vegetables at him.

Roderick Maclean's attempt provided him with the occasion of one of his best worst poems—and provides us with enough evidence to conclude that McGonagall must by any standard be considered a better bad poet than Maclean himself was.

“Attempted Assassination of the Queen”

God prosper long our noble Queen,

And long may she reign!

Maclean he tried to shoot her,

But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside