Shooting Victoria (68 page)

But the letters only came into Monro's possession after 21 June, and so he experienced a harrowing Jubilee Day. He knew on that day that the plot was afoot and had little idea how far it had progressed. For all he knew, Fenians might have succeeded in planting a bomb in the bowels of Westminster Abbey, one the police had been unable to discover when they searched the building the day before. Monro and his family had tickets in the Abbey to view the thanksgiving. He left his children at home, but he and his wife attended. While they were there, and just as Victoria and her family began their procession from Buckingham Palace to the Abbey, Monro was handed a message stating that conspirators had indeed succeeded in planting a bomb in the Abbey. “I was never in a more delicate position in my life,” he later wrote. To alert the crowd now would precipitate a deadly panic. In the end, Monro did nothing but pray. Meanwhile Victoria, who had been reassured by her Home Secretary Henry Matthews that all was safe, proceeded without fear to the Abbey. As usual, she reveled in the crowds, later writing in her journal “there was such an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm as I had hardly ever seen in London before.” Alighting at the Abbey, Victoria slowly walked up the nave and choir to take her place on the Coronation Chair, far less concerned
with the threat of dynamite than with the pleasing fact that she did not see Mr. Gladstone (although he was there). The service began and ended; Victoria's children, children-in-law, and grandchildren approached and kissed her hand; all proceeded back to the Palace. There was no bomb. Millen had been disabled. Cohen and his comrade were not prepared. Moroney, Harkins, and Callan were not even in London, having that very day stepped off the
City of Chester
in Liverpool.

Monro knew, however, that the threat had not passed. Within a couple days, Moroney, Harkins, and Callan were in London; they took up lodgings all around the metropolis. They all represented themselves as traveling salesmen—a dealer in tea, Thomas Callan told his landlady. Having missed their golden opportunity on Jubilee Day, they began to explore other uses for their dynamite. Thomas Callan was twice sent to Windsor Castle with a stopwatch to time how quickly he could plant a bomb in the State Apartments and escape to the railway station. His timing was bad; the state apartments were closed both times, and Callan never returned for fear he would be recognized. Moroney, using one of the letters of introduction Millen had written for him, with Harkins twice visited the House of Commons, where they were shown around by an Irish member; Callan, too, was observed to lurk about the place. Harkins was later found with a newspaper clipping detailing an upcoming public appearance of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour. The dynamiters planned, but did not act—and the Jubilee season passed.

Monro, in the meantime, managed progressively to strangle their operation. When Moroney and Harkins appeared at the House of Commons, detectives were waiting; they lost Harkins but followed Moroney to his lodgings. Monro then quickly applied the same pressure upon Moroney that he had on Millen, setting a police guard upon him and sending a detective to his lodgings to question him “closely.” Thus exposed and spooked, Moroney soon fled to Paris, taking most of the dynamiters' funds with him; there he
took up with a young American woman named Miss Kennedy, and the two proceeded to spend the Clan-na-Gael funds with abandon. Moroney lost contact with his subordinates completely, even though he returned to London twice during the next few weeks. In September he abandoned the mission altogether, decamping with Miss Kennedy to New York.
*

He left behind him a money trail which Monro used to shut down the disintegrating plot completely. Soon after arriving in London in June, Moroney had cashed drafts for over £500 into Bank of England £5 notes. The cashier had carefully noted the numbers of all those bills, and when Monro discovered Moroney's complicity in the plot, he placed a watch at all banks for anyone cashing them. At the beginning of September, Joseph Cohen cashed two of the notes, writing his signature and address on them. He thus led police to his lodgings. Moroney, before fleeing, had entrusted Cohen with the dynamite, in two heavy tin boxes. Days after cashing the £5 notes, however, Cohen collapsed with a serious pulmonary illness, and, fearing exposure, Michael Harkins, with the help of a muscular cabman, moved the dynamite out of Cohen's lodgings. One of the boxes ended up under Thomas Callan's bed. The other disappeared. Cohen's illness quickly worsened; police watched Harkins and Callan come and go repeatedly, nursing the dying man.

In mid-October, Monro exerted pressure again, this time upon Michael Harkins: two police descended on his lodgings demanding he give an account of himself, and discovered his loaded Smith & Wesson pistol as well as his newspaper clipping detailing Irish Secretary Balfour's upcoming public engagement. Harkins, shaken, raced to Cohen's lodgings, where he found that his comrade had just died. The police found Harkins there and arrested him. They
soon released him for lack of evidence, but Monro established an around-the-clock watch by six officers who moved into his lodgings. Harkins could do nothing but try to run, writing to Philadelphia begging for someone to buy him a passage home.

Harkins's immobilization left at large only Thomas Callan (with his dynamite) and the mysterious fifth plotter. Callan was surprised when, in the days after Harkins's arrest, Harkins did not show up for prearranged meetings. On 26 October, however, all became painfully clear to him when he read in the newspapers accounts of the inquest of Joseph Cohen. Monro appeared personally at the inquest and used the occasion to expose the dynamite plot to the public, revealing all he knew about Millen, Moroney, Cohen, and Harkins to reporters and thus to the world.

Callan panicked. He was holding most of the hard evidence of the plot: he had to dispose of the “tea,” as he called it. The detonators he threw into a local pond. But the dynamite was too heavy for that. And so he dragged the slabs to the back garden and into his lodging house's water closet. He flushed away as much as he could, until the pipe was blocked. He dragged the rest to a nearby dustbin, and for some reason threw some of it over the wall, into a neighbor's back garden. (A week later, a boy living there, looking for something with which to line the floor of his pigeon-coop, put some of it in the oven to dry it out: the resulting explosion blew the oven door apart.) Since Moroney had entrusted Callan with none of the funds, Callan was broke, and trapped: he hunkered down in his lodgings, feigning or feeling illness, refusing to leave his bed. He too wrote home, begging for passage back to Massachusetts. And then he waited.

Three weeks later, in mid-November, Callan thought he had found his path to freedom. On the evening of the seventeenth, a stranger came to his lodgings demanding to see him; he was shown up and left ten minutes later. It was almost certainly the mysterious and anonymous fifth conspirator, who handed to Callan four Bank of England £5 notes—some of the money that Moroney had cashed
six months before. The man then left the house and vanished from the observation of the police and from history—though for some time he remained in Monro's mind as a potentially dangerous loose end of the Jubilee Plot.

The next day, Callan received even better news: a letter had arrived from Lowell with a draft for more money—and a prepaid passage to Boston on the Cunard Line. Callan emerged from hiding to cash the £5 notes, to buy a new pair of boots, to disguise himself by shaving off his whiskers. Cashing the £5 notes doomed him: his banker noted their numbers and stalled Callan as he summoned an officer of the City Police. That officer shadowed Callan long enough to conclude that he was about to flee, and then arrested him. Monro ordered Harkins arrested as well. Both were at Scotland Yard by evening.

In the end, only Callan and Harkins went to trial; they alone paid the price for the bungling and double-dealing of their commanders. From the back garden of Callan's lodgings, the police were able to collect over twenty-five pounds of sodden dynamite, which police chemists were able to determine to be of American make. Traces of the stuff were found in both their portmanteaus. At trial in February 1888, Harkins and Callan were both found guilty under the Explosive Substances Act of 1883 and sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude each. Never ceasing to maintain his innocence, Harkins was released from prison in 1892, seriously debilitated by tuberculosis, and died the next year in Philadelphia. Callan—according to a chief constable who interviewed him, “the most harmless of all the dynamiters with whom I have been brought into contact”—at first maintained his innocence as well but later confessed, revealing to police among other things his close encounter with the royal residence at Windsor, if not with the royal person. Monro recommended that Callan be given early release, and after he had served five years of his sentence Callan was quickly put aboard ship and returned via New York to Lowell, whose citizens had never stopped believing that “Poor Tommy Callan” had been
railroaded by the perfidious British. They greeted him as a hero. Callan did not have long to enjoy his minor celebrity; a year later, he was thrown from a cart, smashed his leg, and died.

The botched plot to disrupt the queen's Golden Jubilee turned out to be the final skirmish in the Irish-American dynamite war. But the threat to the Queen did not disappear. As the danger of Fenian terror bombing receded, that of pan-European anarchism grew. Following Lucheni's assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, in 1900, Gaetano Bresci killed King Umberto of Italy with four bullets from a .32 revolver. His assassination inspired Leon Czolgosz to kill American President William McKinley a year later.

The anarchist threat hit home on 4 April 1900, when Victoria's son Bertie was for the only time of his life the target of an assassin's bullet. The Boer War was at that time raging, and across Europe British popularity was at a nadir, so low that Bertie and Princess Alexandra chose to forgo their usual trip to Biarritz for a safer place: Alix's native Denmark. They travelled through Belgium, and at the Gare du Nord on the afternoon of the fourth, just as their train was leaving the station, a boy jumped upon the carriage footboard, thrust a pistol through the window, and from six feet away fired two shots at the Prince. He missed. Bertie later enjoyed joking in letters to his friends about the “pauvre fou,” and about his relief that anarchists could not shoot straight. Victoria was in Ireland on that day, commencing her final and triumphal carriage rides among the “wildly enthusiastic” crowds of Dublin; Beatrice told her of the attempt. “Was greatly shocked and upset,” she wrote in her journal.
*

The assailant's name was Jean-Baptiste Sipido. He was only fifteen years old—younger than any of Victoria's assailants. But he was more truly politically inspired than any of them; he was already a fanatical member of an anarchist club. The Prince of Wales asked Belgian authorities not to treat Sipido too severely, but nevertheless he and the British public were surprised and angered two months later when Sipido was, because of his age, found not mentally responsible for his act. He was set free and immediately fled to France. (He was later extradited to Belgium, where he was confined in a penitentiary until he reached the age of twenty-one.)

At the time of this shooting, Bertie was less than a year away from taking the throne himself—not as Albert I, of course, but as Edward VII. His mother, in the last year of her reign, was already suffering the accumulation of ailments and the slow decline of her faculties that would lead to her death at the very commencement of the twentieth century. Her body was giving out; she routinely travelled in a wheelchair, and her eyesight was fading. Her popularity, however, remained undiminished; indeed, if it were possible, it grew with her every appearance. Those appearances continued until nearly the end. As always, these periodic showings of herself were not motivated by any joy she took in them. She
did
take joy in them, but always after suffering fretting, nervous anticipation: the actual pleasure she felt among her people was perpetually a rediscovery to her, as was the fact that she had become an icon—London's greatest attraction. In 1890, for instance, Victoria was surprised that the public would mass simply to get a moment's view of her when she traveled to London for the interment of one of her beloved ladies, the Marchioness of Ely, at Kensal Green Cemetery. Noting the masses at the cemetery gates, Victoria wrote in her journal “there were crowds out, we could not understand why, and thought something must be going [on], but it turned out it was only to see me.” She might have been baffled at the time, but achieving the personal popularity illustrated on that day had of course been Victoria's life's work, and by the end of her reign the
very legitimacy of the institution depended absolutely upon that popular desire “only to see me.”

And it was during the last two decades of Victoria's reign that British royal ceremonial reached its zenith, with the two great showpieces of the prestige of Victoria's monarchy, the Golden Jubilee of 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. The first was a celebration of Victoria's primacy among monarchs as the royalty of Europe gathered to pay homage to her. The second, under the direction of the Queen's imperialist Minister for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, celebrated the greatness of the British Empire, a greatness embodied by the small but stout woman who had just surpassed her grandfather George III in having the longest reign of any English monarch. Both occasions entirely depended for their success simply upon Victoria going out among her people in processions. Indeed, the Diamond Jubilee consisted
only
of a procession, as the Queen, in 1897 no longer able to walk into St. Paul's for the Thanksgiving Service, refused to be carried inside, and instead viewed from her carriage a short
Te Deum
on the cathedral steps before continuing back to Buckingham Palace.